Erwin Rommel: A Life From Beginning to End (World War 2 Biographies Book 3) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2017-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Near Death Experience

“In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it.”

—Erwin Rommel

As Rommel worked feverishly in his last minute preparations on the Atlantic Wall, he put his boyhood ambitions to be an engineer to good use. Rommel was responsible for creating all kinds of booby traps and fortifications along France’s Atlantic Wall. Some of his trademarks were wooden beams driven into beaches with land mines on top of them, waiting for an unfortunate Allied soldier to step on them.

He had boards with simple steel blades fastened to their ends littered across the beach, jutting out at odd angles, ready to slice open the less vigilant Allied soldier. Rommel also had mines placed strategically in blocks of concrete all over the beachhead as well as mines in random logs, hoping to trip up the GI’s that stumbled upon them, with the blast taking out a few other soldiers with them.

The work was gruesome, but Rommel prepared such drastic measures with stunning precision. At one point in his planning, Rommel even suggested that the top secret VI Rockets—a primitive kind of ballistic missile—should be used to fire upon the region of southern England, in order to do damage to the Allies while they were still in the process of disembarking their invasion force.

Fortunately for the Allies, however, VI production had stalled, and it was deemed not worth the effort. The main objective of Rommel’s defense was to prevent the Allies from ever gaining much of a foothold on the shore of Normandy, but by the end of the night on June 6th, the Allies had landed around 150,000 troops and had already secured five different beachheads. Despite the fierce defense that Rommel had implemented, the Allied soldiers kept on driving forward.

At this point, in the face of such a massive force, Rommel determined that it would be better for his defenders to engage in a small-scale retreat so that they could regroup and then re-engage the allies as a stronger fighting force. A week later on June 17th, Rommel would then propose to Hitler this very plan. Hitler, however, not wishing to give even an inch, refused to entertain the notion.

No matter how much Hitler ignored the reality on the ground, however, as June turned into July, the situation was only getting worse. As the days wore on, the attacks by the Allies grew more and more brazen, so much so that on July 17th, 1944, when Rommel was coming back from a meeting, the car he was riding in was shot up and strafed by an Allied fighter plane.

A quite common occurrence at this point in the Allied invasion of the western front, Rommel had witnessed several vehicles being obliterated by Allied bombers during the course of the drive. Still, he never imagined that his own car would be next on the list of annihilation. Rommel’s driver had tried desperately to get them out of range of the Allied plane’s bombs and guns, but after a 20 mm

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