D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

Konteradmiral Friedrich Ruge, Rommel’s naval adviser and friend. Afterwards, he would continue the discussion with them outside, strolling under two huge cedar trees. They had much to talk about in private.
    Rommel was exasperated by Hitler’s refusal to bring the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine under a centralized command for the defence of France. Encouraged by Göring and Admiral Dönitz, Hitler instinctively preferred to maintain rival organizations which only he could control from the top. Speidel argued that the Luftwaffe had more than a third of a million ground staff and signals personnel in the west, all part of Göring’s empire building. To make matters worse, the Reichsmarschall refused to put his flak corps at the service of the army, which his own aircraft could not defend from Allied air attack.
    Whenever Rommel complained of the uselessness of the Luftwaffe, Führer headquarters would try to impress him with the prospect of a thousand new jet fighters and countless rockets to bring Britain to its knees. Not only did he refuse to believe these promises, he knew that his hands were tied operationally. Ever since the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler had not allowed a flexible defence. Every inch of ground must be held.
    Speidel, a member of the army’s resistance movement, recorded that Rommel himself bitterly quoted Hitler’s own dictum in Mein Kampf from the days of the Weimar Republic: ‘When the Government of a nation is leading it to its doom, rebellion is not only the right but the duty of every man.’ Rommel, however, unlike Speidel and the plotters in Berlin motivated by Oberst Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, did not believe in assassination.
    The elderly Rundstedt, on the other hand, while constantly referring in private to Hitler as ‘that Bohemian corporal’, would never have contemplated revolt. If others were to remove the Nazi ‘brown band’, then he would not stand in their way, but he would certainly not commit himself. His ambivalence went deeper. Rundstedt had accepted massive amounts of money from Hitler and must have felt compromised as a result. But even Speidel underestimated the depths to which Rundstedt would sink after the attempted revolution against Hitler failed.
    Rundstedt had become almost as much a figurehead of the army and nation as Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg after the First World War. The British regarded ‘the Last Prussian’ as nothing more sinister than a reactionary Guards officer and failed to appreciate that he shared many of the Nazis’murderous prejudices. Rundstedt had never objected to the mass murders of Jews by the SS Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front. He had then spoken of the advantages of using the Russian slave labourer in France. ‘If he does not do as he is told,’ he said, ‘he can quite simply be shot.’
    Rundstedt’s dismay over Hitler’s disastrous conduct of the war had turned into a lethargic cynicism. He showed little interest in the theory of panzer tactics and held himself aloof from the fierce debate over the best way to fight the invasion. This was conducted mainly between Rommel on the one hand, who wanted a forward defence to defeat the Allies as they landed, and the two leading proponents of a massive armoured counter-attack on the other: Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, the inspector-general of panzer troops, and General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg.
    Geyr, a former military attaché in London who bore a certain resemblance to Frederick the Great, was rather more cultivated than many of his contemporaries. His intellectual arrogance, however, made him a number of enemies, especially within Führer headquarters and the SS, who suspected his loyalty to the regime. As commander-in-chief of Panzer Group West, Geyr believed with Guderian that a panzer army should be assembled in the forests north of Paris ready to smash the enemy back into the sea.
    Rommel, who first made his name as a bold panzer leader in 1940, had since been profoundly influenced by his experiences in North Africa. And now that the Allies had achieved total air supremacy over north-west Europe, he believed that panzer divisions held back from the front for a counter-attack would never be allowed to reach the battle in time to ensure a decisive result. Predictably, a bad compromise was the result of Hitler’s insistent meddling and the confused command structure. Neither Geyr nor Rommel had control over all the panzer