headed west for Tunisia. Montgomery, mean-
while, cautiously advanced along the coast
from Egypt. This placed the Afrika Korps be-
tween two rapidly closing jaws. At length,
Gen. Albert Kesselring, the German overall
commander, authorized an offensive against
U.S. forces in the vicinity of Kasserine Pass. It
was hoped that the Americans could be elimi-
nated as a threat by smashing the II Corps be-
fore Montgomery arrived in Tunisia. Rommel,
always eager to attack, embraced the plan, but
Gen. Hans-Jurgen Arnim, commanding the
Fifth Panzer Army, only sullenly cooperated.
On February 14, 1942, Arnim commenced his
attack at Sidi bou Zid, and the raw, inexperi-
enced Americans were routed. Rommel en-
joyed similar success two days later, and for a
time it appeared that the entire II Corps could
be surrounded and destroyed. However, this
required reinforcements from the Fifth Panzer
Army, which Arnim refused to supply. It took a
personal visit and a direct order from Kessel-
ring before the recalcitrant general complied.
Arnim then dispatched men and equipment to
Rommel as ordered but defiantly withheld
badly needed tanks. At length, U.S. resistance
stiffened and Rommel’s attack petered out.
For the loss of 1,000 men, the Germans had in-
flicted six times that number, along with sev-
eral hundred tanks destroyed. The Americans
had come off poorly in this, their first brush
with the veteran Wehrmacht, and Eisenhower
shook up his entire command structure. Con-
sequently, leadership of the II Corps was
passed to little-known Patton, whose rise the
Germans came to regret.
Within weeks the Americans recouped
their losses and, in concert with the British
Eighth Army, closed in on Tunisia. Rommel,
sick again, was evacuated before Arnim fi-
nally surrendered in May 1943. Rommel next
received temporary command of troops in
Italy before transferring north to France.
There he served under Field Marshal Gerd
von Rundstedt and oversaw defensive
preparations to repel the anticipated cross-
channel invasion from England. Rommel,
who had firsthand experience fighting the
British and Americans, felt that they must be
defeated at the beach and not allowed to pro-
ceed inland. Allied control of the air, he
feared, would pin the reserves in place before
they could advance. He therefore wished to
place his hard-hitting panzer forces as close
to the front as possible. However, this strat-
egy brought him into conflict with Rundstedt,
who sought to lure the Allies inland before de-
stroying them in a classic panzer attack. Both
were overruled by Hitler, who moved all ar-
mored forces to the rear, from which they
could be moved only with his express permis-
sion. This was the worst possible arrange-
ment, so Rommel redoubled his efforts to
make the beaches as costly to Allied landings
as possible. Fortifications and gun emplace-
ments were erected at threatened points, and
more than 4 million mines were laid. “The war
will be won or lost on the beaches,” he
warned. “We’ll have only one chance to stop
the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water
struggling to get ashore.”
When the Allies finally and unexpectedly
landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, masked
by poor weather, Rommel was reposing at
home. He conferred with Hitler about strategy,
strongly suggesting that the Führer consider a
negotiated peace settlement while the German
army was still intact. Hitler grew enraged at
the mere suggestion; Rommel’s standing was
greatly diminished in Hitler’s eyes. Once back
at the front in July, Rommel observed how the
Allies were bottled up in rough country sur-
rounding the beachhead. Enemy aircraft and
naval gunfire negated all German efforts to
crush the foothold. On July 17, 1944, while re-
turning to the front, Rommel’s car was at-
tacked by British airplanes, he was wounded,
and he returned home to convalesce. Three
days later, disgruntled officers staged a failed
bomb attack against Hitler, who ordered the
immediate arrest of all suspected collabora-
tors, including the Desert Fox. Although Rom-
mel’s complicity in the scheme was dubious, a
pair of generals arrived at his home to inform
him of a choice between suicide or a trial be-
fore a people’s court. To spare his family fur-ROMMEL, ERWIN