Rommel wounded

On the afternoon of 17 July 1944, on the road from Livarot to Vimoutiers in Normandy, two Allied fighters strafed an open staff car from low level. The driver, hit by a round, lost control of the car, which skidded and crashed at the roadside. One of the passengers, thrown out of the vehicle, lay unconscious with blood on his face. It was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, who for the past six months had been strengthening the Atlantic Wall and preparing the coastal defences against invasion, and who since 6 June had been directing the fighting in Normandy. Doctors found several fractures of the skull, including the base, and facial injuries. Rommel survived, but never returned to command.

War chronologies put it briefly: Field Marshal Rommel was seriously wounded when his car was attacked from the air in France. That is accurate. It is worth adding only that the incident came at a particular moment – two days after Rommel had sent Hitler a warning that the front in the west would soon collapse, and three days before the attempt on Hitler’s life, to which the conspirators had wanted to win him over.

Normandy in mid-July

By mid-July the Battle of Normandy was in its sixth week. The Allies had more than a million men ashore, but the beachhead was expanding very slowly. After a month of heavy fighting the British and Canadians had taken the northern part of Caen on 9 July, but the southern suburbs beyond the Orne were still in German hands. In the west the Americans were fighting their way through the Normandy bocage towards Saint-Lô, paying for every kilometre with thousands of killed and wounded. The Germans were holding them, but at a price they could not pay for long.

Rommel knew this arithmetic well. On 6 June he himself had been at home in Germany: he had left on 4 June convinced that in stormy weather – the same weather that had made the Allies postpone the invasion by a day – no landing would take place, and he returned to his headquarters only on the evening of 6 June. From the moment of the Normandy landings his divisions had been losing men and equipment faster than they received replacements. According to his report of mid-July, Army Group B had lost some 97,000 men since 6 June, including 2,360 officers, and had received about 6,000 in return. Two hundred and twenty-five tanks had been destroyed and 17 sent as replacements. Allied air power dominated the battlefield: it destroyed bridges, railway lines and supply columns, and daytime movement on the roads behind the front had become dangerous for any vehicle. These figures are given from the text of the report, as cited by Hans Speidel and Rommel’s biographers among others.

The command had changed as well. At the beginning of July Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief West. In a telephone conversation with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Rundstedt is said to have advised Berlin to “make peace” – or so goes the oft-repeated account, whose exact words are uncertain. His place was taken by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, who came from the Eastern Front. Kluge began by accusing Rommel of defeatism, but after a few days touring the front he reached similar conclusions.

The warning of 15 July

As early as 17 June, at a conference with Hitler at the Wolfsschlucht II headquarters near Margival, Rommel had said that the front in Normandy could not withstand the enemy’s superiority on land, in the air and at sea. Hitler replied with promises of new weapons – V-1 flying bombs and jet aircraft – and demanded that every metre be held. A month later Rommel put his conclusions in writing. On 15 July he signed a report entitled “Observations on the Situation” (Betrachtungen zur Lage), addressed to Hitler through Kluge. After the figures for losses and replacements came the sentence biographers quote most often: “The troops are fighting heroically everywhere, but the unequal struggle is drawing to a close. In my view, the conclusions must be drawn from this situation.” Rommel also wrote that the front might break within two or three weeks.

The original version spoke of “political” conclusions. According to the account of Rommel’s chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, it was he who persuaded the field marshal to strike out the adjective, because in Hitler’s eyes it would have been an open call for talks with the Allies. Speidel also claimed after the war that Rommel had then told him: “I have given him his last chance. If he does not take it, we will act.” We know this remark, however, only from Speidel, who after 1945 had strong reasons to emphasise the resistance within the staff of Army Group B, and thus his own role in it. Historians treat it with caution.

The report did not reach Hitler immediately. Kluge forwarded it only on 21 July, after the assassination attempt, with a covering letter of his own in which he admitted that after touring the front he had reached similar conclusions. Rommel could not have known this – he had been in hospital for four days.

The last tour of the front

Rommel was a commander who wanted to see the battlefield with his own eyes. In Africa he had flown over the desert in a light Fieseler Storch and driven to the front line; in Normandy he set out every day from his headquarters in the château of La Roche-Guyon on the Seine to the headquarters of corps and divisions. Given Allied air superiority, this was increasingly risky. His aides remembered several earlier air attacks from which the field marshal, dismissive of the danger, had emerged unscathed.

On the morning of 17 July Rommel drove towards the front south and east of Caen, where he expected a major British attack soon. He visited the headquarters of infantry divisions and of the SS panzer corps. According to his staff, he spoke among others with General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, commander of I SS Panzer Corps, whom he regarded as loyal to himself. Dietrich is said to have advised him to return by side roads and to exchange his large car for a less conspicuous Kübelwagen. Rommel did not listen.

He drove back to headquarters in the afternoon in an open Horch. The driver was Karl Daniel; in the back sat his aide-de-camp Captain Hellmuth Lang, Major Neuhaus of the staff, and Oberfeldwebel Holke, whose job was to watch for aircraft. The sky was clear, and hundreds of Allied fighters were circling over Normandy, hunting anything that moved on the roads.

The attack near Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery

Rommel drove through Livarot and onto the road to Vimoutiers. Near the village of Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery, on a long straight, Holke spotted two aircraft approaching at low level. According to the accounts of Lang and of Rommel’s friend Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, who knew them at first hand, the field marshal ordered the driver to speed up and reach the next bend, where trees would give cover. They did not make it. Rounds from 20 mm cannon hit the car before it reached the bend. Daniel was seriously wounded in the arm and shoulder and lost control of the wheel; the car struck a tree trunk by the road and overturned into the ditch.

Rommel was thrown from the car and struck his head on the ground. Lang came out of the crash almost unharmed. Neuhaus seemed only bruised – it was only after several days that it turned out that a round exploding on his holster had broken his spine. Daniel later died of his wounds in hospital.

Lang and Holke carried the unconscious field marshal to safety and then took him to Livarot, where a local pharmacist gave him first aid. From there he was taken to the Luftwaffe hospital at Bernay. The diagnosis was serious: several fractures of the skull – sources speak of three or four, including a fracture of the base – a wound to the temple, damage to the left eye and splinters in the face. The doctors did not give him much chance of a quick recovery. After a few days he was moved to the military hospital at Le Vésinet near Paris, and in August to his home at Herrlingen near Ulm.

Who fired

It is still not known for certain who attacked Rommel’s car. Hundreds of fighters were attacking at the time, and a pilot strafing a single car did not know who was inside. The question of who wounded Germany’s most famous general is therefore the subject of a dispute full of contradictory accounts.

For the longest time the credit was given to the commander of No. 602 Squadron RAF, the South African pilot Johannes Jacobus “Chris” le Roux. That is what British wartime sources stated, and le Roux himself could no longer confirm or dispute it, as he was killed later in 1944. Later some researchers, especially French ones, began to point to another pilot of the same squadron, the Frenchman Jacques Remlinger, who was flying as a pair with the New Zealander Bruce Oliver. Remlinger, by his own account, learned only in 1990 whom he had probably strafed. Claims were also made by the Canadian Charley Fox of No. 412 Squadron RCAF and the Australian Fred Cowpe of No. 453 Squadron RAAF, and some authors also mention American P-47s. All these attributions rest on matching the times and places of flights with German accounts, and none can now be conclusively settled.

Kluge in Rommel’s place

Rommel’s injury did not halt the war for even an hour. The next day, 18 July, the British launched Operation Goodwood east of Caen, the largest armoured attack in Normandy, and on the western flank the Americans entered Saint-Lô. Command of Army Group B was not handed to any of the army commanders. Kluge, with Hitler’s approval, took it over personally while remaining Commander-in-Chief West. He moved into the headquarters at La Roche-Guyon and from then on commanded both the whole Western Front and the armies fighting in Normandy – a task beyond the strength of a single staff.

For German propaganda the wounded field marshal was a problem. Rommel was its most famous hero, the symbol of the invincible German soldier, and he could not be killed or wounded by enemy bombs. News of his injuries was long kept secret, and when it was finally released, it spoke of a car accident. This version later appeared in the official announcement of his death as well.

Rommel and the conspiracy

Only three days separate 17 July from the bomb attack at the Wolf’s Lair. The conspirators in Paris – General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, military commander in France, and his associate Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker – had been trying since the spring to win Rommel over to a plan to end the war in the west. Speidel acted as intermediary. How far Rommel committed himself is debated by historians to this day. According to some, including Peter Lieb and Maurice Philip Remy, he was prepared to support an armistice with the Western Allies and the removal of Hitler, although he favoured Hitler’s arrest and trial rather than his assassination. According to others, such as Ralf Georg Reuth, he was not part of the conspiracy and did not know of the planned assassination, and his passive opposition went no further than criticism of the conduct of the war.

What is certain is that the conspirators were counting on his name. A field marshal popular with the army and the public could have given a coup a credibility that no other general could. Many authors therefore believe that the wound of 17 July deprived the conspirators of the man who could have acted in the west after the assassination. Everything that might have followed, however, remains in the realm of speculation. Kluge, who by the evening of 20 July already knew that Hitler had survived, refused to join the coup.

Place in the war

Rommel never returned to the front. At Herrlingen he recuperated in the care of his wife Lucie and son Manfred, his head bandaged and one eye for a time unable to see. Meanwhile the investigation into the 20 July plot reached ever further. Stülpnagel, after a failed suicide attempt, reportedly spoke Rommel’s name in delirium; Hofacker, under Gestapo interrogation, named him as someone in the know; and Carl Goerdeler reportedly had him on a list of candidates for posts in the new state. Hitler did not want to put the Reich’s most popular general before the People’s Court. On 14 October 1944 Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel came to Herrlingen and presented the field marshal with a choice: a trial, or poison, a state funeral and safety for his family. Rommel chose poison. Officially it was announced that he had died of the injuries sustained in the “accident” of 17 July. At the funeral in Ulm, Rundstedt delivered the eulogy.

Rommel’s wound in itself did not change the course of the Battle of Normandy. The front he had warned about on 15 July broke a week after his crash, when the Americans launched Operation Cobra, and in August the Germans were encircled in the Falaise Pocket. Kluge, dismissed by Hitler and suspected of contacts with the conspirators, poisoned himself on 19 August. Speidel was arrested in September, but survived the war and became one of the founders of the Bundeswehr and commander of NATO land forces in Central Europe.

The strafed Horch near Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery marked the beginning of the end of one of the best-known careers of the Second World War, and at the same time became part of the post-war legend of Rommel as a “chivalrous” general who died at Hitler’s hands. Historians point out that this legend simplifies reality: for years Rommel was a beneficiary and faithful executor of the dictator’s will, and his break with Hitler came only when defeat had become inevitable. Militarily, on 17 July 1944 Germany lost an experienced commander in Normandy, whose place was taken by a man already carrying too many responsibilities. Politically, it lost one of the few figures who could have given any settlement with the Allies in the west authority in the eyes of the soldiers.