Rommel and the Atlantic Wall

By the autumn of 1943 the German command no longer had any doubt that the Western Allies would land in France in 1944. To defend the coast Adolf Hitler sent the most famous of his generals, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. War chronologies record under 12 December 1943 that Rommel became “chief of Fortress Europe” and the principal planner of the defence against the expected Allied offensive. That is a simplification. Rommel received no new post on 12 December: he had already been appointed inspector of coastal defences in the West at the beginning of November, and in December he was carrying out that task. After touring the fortifications in Denmark he arrived in France in the middle of the month and began inspecting the Channel coast. The American official history speaks generally of “mid-December” and does not give the exact date of his arrival. He took command of the troops on the coast, as Army Group B, only on 15 January 1944, and even then under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. The term “Fortress Europe” (Festung Europa), for its part, was a propaganda slogan, not the name of a command.

Directive No. 51

The starting point was Hitler’s Directive No. 51 of 3 November 1943. In it Hitler wrote that for the past two and a half years the burden of the fighting had rested in the east, but that now a greater danger had appeared in the west: an Anglo-Saxon invasion. In the east Germany could, in the last resort, give up ground without immediately losing the war. In the west a successful landing would threaten the Ruhr and the whole Reich within a few weeks. The West was therefore to cease being a reservoir of men and equipment for the Eastern Front. Panzer and panzergrenadier divisions in the West were each to receive 93 tanks or assault guns by the end of 1943, and they could be moved east only with Hitler’s consent. The order also provided for strengthening the fortifications, especially on the Channel coast, and for strong reserves for counter-attack.

The directive was not carried out in full. As early as 23 November orders were given to speed up the transfer of the 60th Panzergrenadier Division to the east, and on 3 December 10,000 soldiers of the 1925 class were withdrawn from the divisions in the West. The Eastern Front, where the Red Army had just crossed the Dnieper, continued to drain forces. Nevertheless, the American historian Gordon Harrison observed that November 1943 marked a new beginning in German preparations in the West.

A field marshal without a front

In the summer of 1943 Rommel commanded Army Group B in northern Italy, which after the Italian surrender disarmed the forces of its former ally in Operation Achse. For a long time Hitler intended to give him command over the whole Italian peninsula. Rommel, however, was a pessimist: he believed that southern Italy had to be given up and that the defence should be made only in the Apennines. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring argued that he could hold the Allies south of Rome for a long time. At the end of October Hitler chose Kesselring, and Rommel and his staff were left without a task.

Hitler had long wanted to have a higher headquarters in reserve that could be thrown in wherever the Allies struck first. At the request of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), a reduced Army Group B staff was turned into an “army group for special tasks”, placed directly under the OKW and temporarily moved to Munich. Orders of 6 November instructed Rommel to examine the fortifications first in Denmark, then in Artois – on the Strait of Dover – and then on the Cotentin peninsula, in the Netherlands and in Brittany. In each area he was to prepare operational studies for a counter-attack against a landing. In the event of an invasion his staff was to conduct the main battle.

The choice of Rommel also had a propaganda dimension. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that Rommel was “undoubtedly the right man”. The name of the victor of Tobruk was meant to put heart into the weak occupation divisions in the West and at the same time to unsettle the Allies. The OKW assured Rundstedt that the new headquarters did not curtail his authority. In practice a structure emerged in which two field marshals with differing views operated on the same coast. The air force and the navy, moreover, answered to their own commanders.

Rommel left Italy on 21 November. At the beginning of December he toured the coast of Denmark, where the Germans had built, among other things, a powerful heavy artillery battery at Hanstholm on the northern tip of Jutland. Around the middle of December, once the Danish inspection was over, he arrived in France and began inspecting the sector of the Fifteenth Army, which defended the coast from the mouth of the Scheldt to Normandy – precisely where the Germans most expected a landing.

A wall of concrete and propaganda

By then the Atlantic Wall had been under construction for two years. On 14 December 1941, a week after the United States entered the war, Hitler demanded a “belt of fortresses” along the Atlantic coasts. In March 1942 his Directive No. 40 regulated coastal defence, and after the Dieppe Raid in August 1942 Hitler demanded the construction of thousands of permanent concrete bunkers from Norway to the Spanish border. The building work was carried out by the Organisation Todt, a state construction organisation which after the death of Fritz Todt in February 1942 passed under the direction of the armaments minister Albert Speer. It employed German specialists, but above all workers from the occupied countries, many of them forced labourers. According to figures given in the German literature, some 290,000 people in all were working on the sites in France at that time, of whom only a little over ten thousand were Germans.

Propaganda presented the Wall as an impassable barrier of steel and concrete. The reality was more modest. The ports and the coast along the Strait of Dover, where batteries of heavy guns capable of shelling Dover stood, were the most strongly fortified. A disproportionate amount of concrete was swallowed up by the Channel Islands, which Hitler had ordered to be fortified as the only scrap of British soil under German occupation. On long stretches of Normandy and Brittany, by contrast, there were only scattered positions, often unfinished, manned by static divisions without their own transport, made up of older age groups, convalescents and Ost battalions recruited from Soviet prisoners of war. Rundstedt, who was himself responsible for the construction, later said that the Wall had been above all a propaganda exercise. After his first tours Rommel came to a similar conclusion: instead of a continuous wall he found a chain of strongpoints with large gaps between them.

Stop them on the beach

Rommel came to France with experience that commanders who knew only the Eastern Front lacked. In North Africa he had learned what enemy command of the air meant: armoured columns that set off along the roads in daylight were broken up by aircraft before they reached the battlefield. From this he concluded that an invasion had to be repulsed on the shore itself or just behind it, in the first hours, when the landing force was at its weakest. The panzer divisions should be stationed close to the coast so that they could strike at once. Reserves kept deep inland, near Paris, would not get there in time under the bombs. According to the account of his aide, Captain Hellmuth Lang, popularised by Cornelius Ryan, in the spring of 1944 Rommel said that the first 24 hours of the invasion would be decisive, and that for the Allies and for Germany alike it would be “the longest day”.

Rundstedt thought differently, as did his armour adviser, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, who was placed at the head of the new Panzer Group West headquarters. Both wanted to keep the panzer divisions in a central reserve deep inland, wait until the Allies revealed the main axis of their attack, and then smash them with a single powerful counter-stroke, as in 1940 and in operations in the east. The dispute between these concepts dragged on until the spring of 1944. Hitler settled it with a compromise that satisfied no one: three panzer divisions were given to Rommel, four remained in a reserve under the OKW, and still others went to the army group in the south of France.

In December 1943 the dispute was only just beginning. Rommel and Rundstedt did, however, quickly agree that an inspector operating outside the chain of command would only be a source of friction. On 30 December Rundstedt proposed that Rommel’s staff be subordinated to the Commander-in-Chief West as Army Group B, with the Seventh Army in Normandy and Brittany, the Fifteenth Army on the Strait of Dover and the troops in the Netherlands. Hitler agreed, with the reservation that Rommel’s staff might still be used elsewhere. The change came into effect on 15 January 1944. Rommel had his headquarters first at Fontainebleau and from March in the château of La Roche-Guyon on the Seine.

On the other side of the Channel

While Rommel was touring the coast, on the other side of the Channel preparations were under way for the operation against which he was to defend France. At the Tehran Conference at the end of November Roosevelt and Churchill had promised Stalin an invasion of France in May 1944. In November the Allied Expeditionary Air Force had been formed to secure command of the air for the invasion – the very thing Rommel feared most. More American divisions and corps headquarters were arriving in Britain. The Allies had behind them the experience of landings in North Africa, in Sicily and at Salerno, where German counter-attacks had almost driven them into the sea but had finally broken down under the fire of warships and aircraft. For Rommel this was a further warning that the battle had to be won at once.

Significance

Rommel’s arrival in France in December 1943 was not the assumption of command over “Fortress Europe” but the beginning of six months of feverish work on the fortifications. Rommel ordered obstacles against landing craft – made of timber beams, steel “hedgehogs” and mines – to be put up on the beaches, and stakes, which the soldiers called Rommel’s asparagus, to be driven into meadows where gliders might land. He planned millions of mines. By June 1944, according to various estimates, between four and six million had been laid on the French coast, many times more than before his arrival. Much of the work, however, remained unfinished for lack of concrete, men and time.

The Allied deception, Operation Fortitude, confirmed the Germans in their belief that the main landing would come on the Strait of Dover. On 6 June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy. Rommel was then at home in Herrlingen, for his wife’s birthday. The beach defences held up the landing only on the Omaha sector, and only for a few hours. The panzer divisions in reserve waited a long time for Hitler’s consent, and on the march they were destroyed by Allied aircraft, exactly as Rommel had foreseen. The dispute over the use of armour that had begun in the winter of 1943 ended in the worst possible solution: the armoured forces were neither close enough to the beaches nor concentrated in a single powerful fist. On 17 July 1944 Rommel was seriously wounded when aircraft attacked his car, and on 14 October 1944, suspected of links to the plot against Hitler’s life, he was forced to commit suicide.