Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives

By Peter Caddick-Adams

“An accessible, well-honed study of two fascinating characters” who famously fought each other in numerous battles during WWII, from Egypt to D-Day (Kirkus).

Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel faced one another in a series of extraordinary battles that established each man as one of the greatest generals in history. Born four years apart, their lives were remarkably similar. Each came from provincial roots, nearly died in WWI, yet emerged from that great conflict with glowing records.

Through their many duels, including their legendary conflicts in North Africa and later at the Normandy D-Day invasion, Peter Caddick-Adams tracks and compares their military talents and personalities. Monty and Rommel explores how each general was raised to power by their war leaders, Churchill and Hitler, and how the innovative military strategy and thought of both permeate down to today's armies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781468309065

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Copyright

This edition first published in the United States in 2012 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail]

Copyright © 2011 by Peter Caddick-Adams

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-089-5

To Stefania and Emmanuelle for their

love, support and tolerance in allowing me to

spend so much time with the field marshals.

Contents

Copyright

Maps

Prologue

Part One. Baptism and Fire

1 The Irishman

2 The Swabian

3 First Combats

4 Cheating Death

5 Learning the Trade

6 Bloody Red Tabs

7 The Mountain Lion

8 Mud and Mountains

9 The Last Year

Part Two. Interwar: Preparations

10 Coping with Peace

11 Preparing for War

Part Three: The Making of Modern Major Generals

12 Phoney War

13 Blitzkrieg

14 Duel in the Desert I

15 Duel in the Desert II: The Battles of El Alamein

Part Four. Once More Unto the Breach

16 Two Return to France

17 Defending Normandy

18 Britain’s Last Hurrah!

19 Where is Rommel?

20 Exploiting the Beachhead

21 Plots and Breakouts

22 Beyond the Bocage

Part Five. The Final Duel: Reputations

23 How Will History Judge Me?

24 The Desert Fox Reborn

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Guide to Ranks

List of Illustrations

Index

List of Maps

1. Monty at Ypres, 1914, 1917–18

2. Monty at the Somme, 1916 and 1918

3. Rommel on the Piave, 1917

4. Rommel at Arras, 21 May 1940

5. The Dunkirk Perimeter, 30 May–2 June 1940

6. Rommel in France, 1940

7. Western Desert Campaigns, 1940–43

8. Monty and Rommel at El Alamein, 1942

9. Monty in Normandy, 1944

10. Normandy: The Breakout

There was rarely a quiet moment in the Ypres area, which witnessed near-continuous fighting, from October 1914 to October 1918. Monty was dangerously wounded in Méteren in 1914, and from 1917–18 he planned operations as a staff officer with IX Corps in the battlefields east of Ypres. Within the Ypres salient are the villages of Gheluvelt and Messines, where Adolf Hitler fought, and Ploegsteert, where Lt.-Colonel Winston Churchill’s battalion (6/Royal Scots Fusiliers) was stationed between January and May 1916.

Named after a river that most British troops never got to see, the Somme battlefields witnessed Monty’s presence twice. Initially during the ‘Great Push’ of 1916, whose slow progress is charted here, Bernard’s 104th Brigade fought in the area of Trônes Wood, Malz Horn Farm and Guillemont. His advance with 47th Division in 1918 is also shown, including Happy Valley, where his brigade paraded in 1916, but which his division attacked in 1918.

Rommel’s 1917 war in Italy was one characterised by speed and movement, in contrast to the static nature of the Western Front. Erwin advanced 150 miles over twenty-two days, ending spectacularly on the River Piave, at Longarone, on 10 November. His achievement is all the more impressive when one remembers that most of it was conducted in contact with the enemy, over tiring mountainous terrain and on foot.

The armoured counter-attack against 7th Panzer Division at Arras was the first time Rommel encountered British troops. Deploying from Vimy, the Royal Tank Regiment’s Matildas completely surprised disorganised German units; only the speedy use of artillery at Telegraph Hill and Wailly saved 7th Panzer division from annihilation. Caught in the midst of the fracas, Rommel was left with an indelible impression of British resourcefulness.

Historians agree that of all British formations which fought in 1940, Monty’s 3rd Division performed best. It trickled into the Dunkirk perimeter whilst fighting rearguard actions to slow the German advance, before rescue from the beaches or port. Dunkirk also witnessed Monty’s elevation from divisional to corps command, when his boss (Brooke) departed for England.

It was 7th Panzer Division’s dramatic progress through northern France in 1940 that brought Rommel national acclaim throughout Germany, a Knight’s Cross and led directly to his North African posting. He covered over 500 miles in forty days – with battles on the River Meuse and at Arras and the capture of Cherbourg on 19 June.

The advances and retreats of both sides in North Africa took place over huge distances, underlining how success rested on efficient logistics. All supplies had to be imported by air or sea and trucked to the battlefields. The campaign had a see-saw nature at the operational level, and Rommel came very close to his goals of Cairo and the Suez Canal.

As well as numerical superiority, some of Monty’s success at El Alamein was due to his ability to deceive his opponents into believing that Eighth Army’s strike would come from the south. At this stage the Afrika Korps were 700 miles from their nearest port, Benghazi, and 1,400 miles from Tripoli, whilst Cairo for the British was a mere 150 miles east by road or rail.

Caen dominated the eastern sector of the Normandy battlefield. Failure to seize the city on D-Day necessitated a series of frustrating and attritional operations, each of increasing size, in an effort to fight in more favourable terrain and break out of the bridgehead. Note the proximity of Monty’s headquarters to the battle zone, whereas Rommel’s headquarters was a hundred miles east, at La Roche Guyon.

Considering that the bulk of Allied forces were still around Falaise on 21 August, their subsequent breakout was conducted with great speed. Rheims was liberated on 30 August, Arras and Mons on 2 September, Brussels the following day, Charleville on 4 September and Ypres two days later. Once the Normandy front collapsed there were few German reserves to stem the extremely rapid advance, sometimes dubbed ‘Monty’s Blitzkrieg’.

Prologue

At every crossway on the road to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

Count Maurice de Maeterlinck

IT IS MID-AFTERNOON ON 21 May 1940, a warm Tuesday, near Arras in northern France. Last year, the scaffolding came down, ending years of reconstruction. The Great War had seen Arras shelled mercilessly. Now it looks like happening all over again.

The same grey-clad invaders are once more at the gates. One of them, an officer who had done well in the previous conflict, is now a divisional commander. The sun catches the unique bauble Generalmajor Erwin Rommel wears at his throat, the Pour le Mérite. His business is reducing attrition. Not in avoiding combat, but by superior tactics which will limit the fighting. Using tanks at high speed, and lots of them, he aims to slice through his opponents’ lines before they know what’s happened. So far he has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. The forty-eight-year-old took over his command just two months earlier, when his men were still in training. Now they are further into France than any of their fellow invaders, and have become known as ‘the Ghost Division’ for their wraithlike ability to materialise anywhere on the battlefield.

The weather is considerably better than it had been back in 1917, when last a major battle erupted around Arras. Warm sun has turned the chalky topsoil to fine powder; it is hot. The dips and mounds in the fields around signify the old trenches and dug-outs of earlier battles, mellowed by time. These were once occupied by the headquarters of the British 33rd Division, where his future Second World War rival served as a staff officer. Rusting strands of old barbed wire remain, as if handing over the fighting from one generation to the next.

Rommel can now see dust clouds trundling towards him: this can only mean one thing. Tanks. He curses his luck. Normally he would be riding in the tank of his friend, Colonel Rothenburg, commanding his 25th Panzer Regiment, but today he has let them continue their lightning advance without him. His infantry – the 7th Rifle Regiment – though in trucks, are too slow for his liking and he has dropped back to chivvy them along. And now the British are attacking his unprotected flanks.

Fifty miles away to the north-east, on the outskirts of another big city, Lille, another divisional commander is facing his traditional foe. It is a warm day here too. He sports khaki battledress and wears the special ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order. Since the Germans invaded over a week earlier, his troops have been rushed from place to place in Belgium, achieving little. There’s no overall strategy and absolutely zero cooperation with his French and Belgian allies. His own warriors are conveyed in a laughable mixture of camouflaged trucks and brightly coloured baker’s vans, because of a lack of investment by politicians over the years. The soldiers of his formation have cursed him ever since the war began for their harsh training – tougher than any other division – but now the results are beginning to pay off. They are coping with the endless marches and little sleep better than the rest of Britain’s Expeditionary Force.

Deployed along a ten-mile stretch of the lazy River Escaut, between Pecq and Avelgem in Belgium, his men are dug in and have been under intense shellfire since 2 a.m. Peering through the smoke, Bernard Montgomery can see that the factories and homes lining the water’s edge are crumbling under the tornado of German shells. He was woken earlier by a series of distinctive blasts signifying the end of the many bridges across the river, blown by his engineers to block the German advance. His own guns speak again, but the weight of fire is coming from the invaders.

Meanwhile, in the eleven days since Generalmajor Rommel’s advance began, the French have barely attacked his panzers with more than a shotgun. Yet, the General is annoyed. His young troops have tasted victory and are off their guard. They have paused, thirsty, and are resting their tired feet in scuffed jackboots. Grimy-eyed, dozing in the sun, their limp fingers hold cigarettes trailing smoke. They are overconfident. The Luftwaffe own the skies, their bombers drone lazily overhead, seeking prey. In the hamlets surrounding Arras, Rommel’s vehicles are backed up in the narrow lanes, unable to move. Exactly what he warned them about in training. Quick-tempered, the General is about to shatter the peace of the day.

A shell whines over; then another. Under fire, a half-track explodes, showering the cobbled street with burning fuel and rubber: confusion reigns. A soldier, badly burned, runs screaming. The General is angry at the chaos. Yet he knows exactly what to do: he has seen it all before. The smell of high explosive takes him back, instinctively, to other battles.

He urges his driver through the village and up a hill. Towards the firing. Always towards the trouble. They turn right, past the cemetery. Under the leaves of a small copse, he spies more gunners milling around in panic, their hot meals abandoned. He quits his command car and snaps out a hurricane of orders. Then an inner calm descends. His young aide, Leutnant Most, scuttles after him, maps and notebook at the ready, as he has been taught. With astonishing energy the General moves and thinks supremely fast:

‘You men, unhook those guns, NOW!’

‘You, the ammunition.’ He starts to form a gun line. Anything will do.

‘Herr General, these are anti-aircraft guns.’ No problem. As long as it has a barrel and will fire.

‘Herr General, we have only anti-aircraft ammunition, not suitable against tanks.’ Always problems, not solutions.

‘The Tommies will not know the difference. Open Fire!’

He dashes about. Seconds matter. Here and there, he lends a hand to push gun wheels through the dirt, pulls on a barrel to swing this or that cannon into position. A quick squint through his binoculars. The leading tanks are no more than two hundred metres away. It is going to be close.

His artillerymen sweat to feed their guns quickly.

‘Make every shot count,’ he orders, and picks out targets for his men.

The heavy British tanks, ‘Matildas’, are now close enough for the squeal of their tracks to be audible above the gunfire; they halt and shudder as the rounds strike home. Sparks fly and a metallic ‘ping’ sounds, as shells bounce off the armour plate.

Curses! Then some penetrate. The monsters erupt in flames. Loose caterpillar tracks writhe like snakes. The nearest tank pauses, a turret hatch opens with a resounding clang and a grim-faced officer climbs down, cap askew, and – arms raised – walks unsteadily towards the guns that have just killed his driver.

It is over. The chief’s quick thinking has saved the moment.

He rests his binoculars and rolls a spent brass shell case, still hot, with his boot. He turns to his aide, a sparkle of triumph in his eyes that he has not known since 1917. But the expression is wiped from his face and replaced with one of horror as Most, so young and keen, falls towards him and collapses in his arms. Blood gushes from his mouth, he is mortally wounded.

Rommel not only mourns his friend, but ponders, as we could, on what might have been – had the British soldier adjusted his sights and aimed just a fraction to the left.

In the same hour, back on the Escaut, Major General Montgomery watches as the shelling subsides. Suddenly he sees the muddy river is full of little specs – rubber dinghies, manned by German assault troops, paddling furiously. Their machine guns spit fire from the far banks to cover them. One boat flips over, a lucky mortar round shatters another. A sniper takes care of the NCO urging his men on in a third craft. Binoculars reveal that the splashing menace is still swarming across the water. A few have reached the near bank but are met by screaming men in khaki, wielding bayonets. Softened almost into melody by the distance, the mosquito whine of German machine guns alternates with the slower, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of British Brens. Quickly, his artillery find the range and a pattern of water plumes engulfs the picture. As the spray and smoke subside, the menace has become a mass of broken boats and twisted life, which ebb slowly downstream.

Although the first attack has failed, there will be others; the British general’s life story is one of having prepared for moments such as these; he knows that now is not the moment for sentiment over the dead. Earlier wars and battles have told him what to expect. His formation, who also have a nickname – the Iron Division – must now live up to their sobriquet and hold on the rest of the day and into tomorrow, before orders permit them to withdraw. Much against his expectations, within days he will find himself promoted to command a corps of several divisions, from sand dunes around a little port called Dunkirk. Bernard Montgomery vows that if he ever visits the continent as a general again, it will not be under such ignominious circumstances.

I have the letter still. It is addressed to my maternal grandfather, who left it to me. The paper is still crisp; the blue ink of the unmistakeable, slightly immature handwriting remains sharp. My grandfather happened to be a bishop, as was the letter writer’s father, and in handing me a keepsake dated 6 July 1952, Clifford Arthur Martin, 4th Bishop of Liverpool, triggered a sense of curiosity which never departed. The letter’s contents are unremarkable, but I always wondered who this busy Field Marshal Montgomery was, who excused himself as too busy to come and preach in my grandfather’s cathedral. Then – after one Sunday afternoon black-and-white feature film – I discovered Monty’s nemesis, Erwin Rommel. Gradually the similarities and interrelations between the two commanders dawned on me.

Born four years apart, with birthdays separated by two days, Montgomery and Rommel were wounded and decorated within days of each other in 1914. They were ‘outsiders’ in several ways: neither came from families with a military tradition, and they originated in provinces distant from their capitals: Ulster and Swabia. Their lives would be closely intertwined, fighting as opposing divisional commanders in 1940, then leading their respective armies during major duels in North Africa and Normandy, which saw both elevated to the dizzy rank of field marshal. Wiry and slight of stature, they came from large families, but produced single sons in the same year, 1928. Both were notoriously thrifty in their domestic milieu, neither was particularly sophisticated, their lives revolved around work; families came second.

The two capitalised on their experience of the First World War through writing, produced tactical textbooks, and kept voluminous notes and diaries in the Second World War with an eye to post-war publication. The way they would in the future meet and inspire front-line soldiers, plan operations, hire and fire subordinates, deal with logistics and take account of casualties – both estimated and actual – was forged in the fury of combat of the trenches and, by 1918, their respective ideas on leadership and command had already become well established.

The future field marshals reacted to the distance of their superiors in the First World War and became beacons of hope for their respective nations and iconic leaders for their troops, with whom they communicated in person where possible and if not, via newspapers, radio and propaganda. The conflict we commonly associate with the two is the Desert War in North Africa, yet they served in an extensive, and arguably far more important, range of campaigns.

Both men conducted their battles from captured armoured caravans, taken as booty. The pair never met, but Rommel later paid warm tribute to Monty’s skill.1 Whilst interrogating a captured British officer over tea in May 1944, Rommel asked after his ‘old friend General Montgomery’.2 For his part, Montgomery had Rommel’s portrait hung in his own battle caravan ‘to understand what made him tick’, and named one of his dogs and a horse after him. Monty observed later in life that ‘I would have liked to discuss the battle [of El Alamein] with him. But he is dead and we cannot tell the story together.’3

Montgomery and Rommel often found themselves tested and frequently triumphed over adverse circumstances that would defeat most of us just reading about them, from Montgomery’s attempts to shore up his brigade’s morale on the Somme in 1916, to Rommel’s juggling of diminishing resources to meet the next thrust of the Eighth Army in late 1942. Were they similar in character, or did they just travel the same path through war and life together? Both were highly controversial during their lifetimes, were often at war as much with their superiors as with their opponents, and yet still beat the drum from afar today. It is perhaps also important to understand both commanders in the context of modern military leadership, especially whilst we are again at war, so as not to perpetuate their faults – hidden as they may be, by the dazzle of the reputation we have given them. They commanded in an era where decisions were made in the war rooms of distant capitals, which they were obliged to enact. They were products of different political systems: Rommel grew up under a militaristic autocracy and served a dictatorship; Monty was the product of a democracy, with all that implies; neither was particularly scholarly or politically aware (to the detriment of their careers) so this may not have occurred to them.

In their different ways they made themselves the centre of the decisionmaking process, wrenching back the initiative from their superiors. Both marshals may have been over-promoted: we shall see. They were certainly stubborn, poor team players and notoriously intolerant of allies. Montgomery refused to accept Churchill’s directives as to when to fight at Alamein; the price Monty paid for his squabbles with superiors and colleagues was eternal damage to his reputation. Rommel, meanwhile, frequently disobeyed Hitler. Eventually this cost him his life.

PART ONE

BAPTISM

AND FIRE

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley, The Go Between

1

The Irishman

BERNARD MONTGOMERY and Erwin Rommel shared a gift for communication. This is how we remember them: boosting their troops’ morale in the dark days, inspiring their countrymen and befriending the world’s media when this was uncommon amongst professional soldiers; leaving a mark for posterity through photographs, film and the books they wrote. Both came from long lines of worthy, middle-class stock – communicators by trade: one was the son of a vicar, the other of a school teacher. Curiously, neither had any significant military tradition in their ancestry. Such solid lineage provided each with continuity and self-assurance, a firm bedrock on which to found any career. The two were born into empires now long gone, in an era of confidence and growth. In Britain and Germany, each then the centre of an imperial web, society was enjoying the fruits of hard-won wealth after the nation-building social upheavals of the early nineteenth century. Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy were at the height of their literary fame. Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Monet and Van Gogh were producing some of their finest canvases, whilst Brahms, Delius, Grieg and Verdi were delighting audiences with their music. Richard Wagner had just died and Edward Elgar was a decade away from finding fame.

Bernard Law Montgomery, the fourth child of an eventual nine (six boys and three girls), was born in the fiftieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign and would serve six monarchs. He arrived on 17 November 1887 in the middle of the long Victorian afternoon of imperial achievement. 1887 was a relatively quiet year; there were no major wars or upheavals. Indeed, the year epitomised stability and success. At the summer solstice, 21 June, Victoria celebrated fifty years on the imperial throne with a banquet to which fifty European kings and princes were invited; an impressive review of her Royal Navy at Spithead followed.* Western Europe and the United States were brimming with prosperity, represented in Germany (then a mere sixteen years old) by the unveiling of the first Daimler automobile and the patenting of the gramophone. This was an era when much of the world looked to Britain for leadership, guidance or moderation; a time which often conferred on the Empire’s sons a degree of confidence in their place in the world, and sometimes a touch of arrogance or xenophobia.

The year of Monty’s arrival witnessed the birth of another enduring facet of British life: the resident of 221b Baker Street. Mr Sherlock Holmes appeared in the same year as Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Ryder Haggard’s She. His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, would later chronicle the history of the First World War. Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister and had just lost his talented Chancellor of the Exchequer in a surprise resignation. Monty would spend his most influential years working with the ex-Chancellor’s son, Winston Churchill. 1887 also saw the arrival of the future war poet, Rupert Brooke, and several future generals, including Alan Cunningham, an Irish gunner and the Eighth Army’s first commander (whose elder brother, Andrew, would command the Mediterranean Fleet, 1939–43); Henry Pownall, Chief of Staff to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1939; and ‘Pug’ Ismay, deputy secretary to Churchill’s war cabinet. Amongst Monty’s future adversaries born during this time was Wilhelm Canaris, head of German intelligence in the Second World War, and two important armour specialists: Geyr von Schweppenberg (born 1886) and Heinz Guderian (1888). Three days before Montgomery’s birth, on 14 November, a future President of the United States was delivered of a son, whom he christened Theodore – Teddy – after himself; Teddy would later lead the US 4th Division ashore on D-Day.

It is often said that Mars favours the month of November for some of its greatest sons and daughters, and whilst we are now aware of Monty, Rommel (15 November) and Teddy Roosevelt, we ought to remind ourselves that George Smith Patton was born in 1885 on 11 November, whilst Charles de Gaulle arrived in 1890 on the 22nd day of the same month. All of these warriors fall under the sign of Scorpio, which to astrologers (if you follow such things) is one of the four fixed signs of the Zodiac. These signs are thought to represent determination, power, natural leadership, purpose, reliability, loyalty and self-confidence – but also stubbornness and immovability, with a tendency to get stuck in ruts. Those born under a fixed sign supposedly pursue their goals with dogged persistence and have great powers of concentration. Scorpio is known also as a water sign, representing passion, intuition and imagination. In the language of astrology, Scorpios like activity, mysteries, secrets, winning, being acknowledged – and strategy. Apparently the best occupations for such enquiring, searching and calculating types are said to include medicine, science, research, insurance, financial analysis, politics – and soldiering.

Bernard (Law was the surname of his great, great, great grandmother, which subsequently became a family Christian name) Montgomery, the third son and fourth child, was born in Kennington, a modest south London suburb, to a Church of England clergyman, the Reverend Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, and his wife Maud (née Farrar). Henry was the vicar of St Mark’s, Kennington, officiating from a fine old neo-classical church and residing in a red-brick vicarage overlooking Kennington Oval. The church still stands – despite being bombed and burnt out in 1940 – and remains the centre of a thriving evangelical parish. Both of Bernard’s parents were products of colonial rule and Anglican evangelism, two of the solid platforms of Victorian Britain. His mother, Maud, was the daughter of a prolific author, Dean Farrar. Born Frederic W. Farrar in Bombay, the son of a Church Missionary Society chaplain, Farrar was a bright cleric who became headmaster of Marlborough in 1871 and Chaplain to the Queen in 1873. Three years later Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli urged him to accept the post of Canon of Westminster and Rector of St Margaret’s – Parliament’s own church, adjacent to the Abbey.

Dean Farrar was also vice president of the Temperance League and thus pushed all the right buttons for austere, prim, middle-class Britain – perhaps a hint here of the teetotalism that was to rule Monty’s later life. Through a huge number of books (he wrote seventy-two, the best-known being Eric, or Little by Little, the tale of a public schoolboy’s descent into immorality) and his oratory (he was regarded as a gifted speaker), Farrar’s influence was as wide as his congregations were full, often to overflowing, so that it became necessary to reserve seats. (Sadly, when paring down our family library some years ago, I consigned our copy of Eric, or Little by Little, to the local charity shop, before I realised its significance, along with a whole pile of unread quasi-religious novels and strident evangelical missionary tomes of the late nineteenth century; for my forebears were not dissimilar and, I suspect, also caught up in Farrar-fervour.)

In his lifetime Dean Farrar’s brand of revivalist Anglicanism works was as popular as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days. Hughes put the fictional Tom Brown at Rugby where he himself had been educated, under the reforming headmaster Thomas Arnold. It was Arnold’s potent and fashionable late-nineteenth-century brew of muscular, evangelical Anglicanism and a Christian-Socialist sense of ‘fair play’ that provided exactly the sort of pulpit-thumping ideas promoted by Hughes and Farrar. As his extensive duties kept him away from his parochial responsibilities, Dean Farrar took on curates to help ease the load. One of these was Henry Montgomery. Connections helped: Farrar had been housemaster to Henry at Harrow.

Though gentler in temperament, less of a ‘mover and shaker’ than Dean Farrar, Henry Montgomery came from a not dissimilar background. He was the eldest son of Robert Montgomery, a humble, religious and self-made colonial administrator who rose to become Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and was rewarded with a knighthood. To the biographer Alun Chalfont, Sir Robert represented, ‘for better or for worse, Victorian values at their most admirable, and he strove quite explicitly to pass them on’. Henry Montgomery was a Trinity College Cambridge man, ordained in 1871. Five years later, after an extensive tour of the Middle East, he took up the curacy under Dean Farrar at St Margaret’s, Westminster. That Farrar was an influential figure in his day is reinforced by the callers to his house, amongst them key literary figures, educators and artists including Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth and Millais.1

Henry Montgomery, the bachelor curate, was one such caller who drifted to the house for intellectual refreshment, and it was there that he fell under the spell of one of the dean’s daughters. He first met Maud when she was eleven. He proposed three years later – when he was thirty-two and she fourteen – and married her two years later with the dean’s blessing.* Henry was given a parish of his own in 1879 – St Mark’s, Kennington – and it was to here that he brought his young bride. He had a practical side and ran his parish like a military unit. Perhaps he needed to, for his responsibilities included 16,000 parishioners, 250 church workers and 125 Sunday school teachers. Henry was bent on his own calling, and became emotionally and spiritually detached from his young wife. Maud, formerly the centre of attention at her father’s soirées, threw herself into her husband’s work, and took control domestically of the home and of their children.

The parish was soon regarded as highly successful and a template for others, so successful indeed that in 1889 Henry was appointed Bishop of Tasmania, necessitating the removal of the family overseas. The appointment and commensurate rise in salary brought some welcome financial relief to the family. Sir Robert Montgomery had died just after Bernard’s birth, leaving Henry the family estate of New Park at Moville, County Donegal, but also a £13,000 mortgage outstanding. Despite selling off some outlying farms and juggling finances in order to run New Park and St Mark’s vicarage, it had been a struggle to raise the family on a vicar’s wage, and this had brought a degree of austerity and tension to the lives of the young Montgomerys.

The family estate at Moville, on the west bank of Lough Foyle and a boarding point for emigrants to the United States and Canada, was a special place for the Montgomerys. The family, who had settled in the area in the seventeenth century (Ulster remains home to many distant and distinguished strains of the Montgomery family), were descended from Hugh Montgomerie, 5th Earl of Eglington, whose nephew, Colonel Alexander Montgomery, crossed to Ireland in about 1640. His descendant, Samuel Montgomery, a Sheriff of Londonderry, built the family home in 1776, ironically – in view of Bernard’s later abstinence – having made his fortune as a wine merchant. The Reverend Henry honeymooned at Moville with Maud in 1881 and they and the children – Bernard, Sibyl (who died aged seven in 1889), Harold, Donald, Una, Maud Winifred (known as Winsome), Desmond (who died aged thirteen in 1909), Colin, and Brian – would spend a six-week holiday there each year, where the family rode and shot, sailed and fished. Henry and Maud later retired here.2 Life Magazine ‘dropped in’ on Lady Maud Montgomery at Moville in a photo feature of their 28 June 1943 edition: the impression is conveyed of a frugal old lady in threadbare woollen cardigans struggling with a big, damp old house full of family mementos – an image familiar to generations of British readers, but appearing amusingly eccentric to Life’s predominantly American readership.

The Montgomery family could trace their lineage back to Roger de Montgomeri, lord of a small Normandy town, who was a kinsman of William the Conqueror, and one of his most loyal supporters. After the latter’s victory at Hastings on 14 October 1066, Montgomeri was rewarded with land that eventually became Montgomeryshire and a title, Earl of Shrewsbury. On his death in 1095 he was buried in Shrewsbury Abbey. Bernard and his siblings were very aware of their family’s ancestry and the estate at Moville that had housed their family for over a century and a half. The irony of Bernard reconquering his distant ancestor’s homeland was not lost on him during the Normandy campaign of 1944.

In 1889 the Montgomerys left England for their new home in Bishopscourt, Hobart with the five children. Bernard was two and his earliest memories were of Australia. There is less Outback in Tasmania, making it is as close to England in appearance as you can find in the Southern Hemisphere. In the 1890s it was still Anglican Middle England, with an accent. This was a world of big houses, of high ceilings and rooms made into chapels; of lessons at home with the governess; of family prayers twice a day and grace before all meals; of stained-glass and Gothic arched windows. It was an orderly, predictable world, where a Dickensian missionary zeal prevailed, run like clockwork to Maud’s daily routine. On Sundays there was church – morning and evening – plus Sunday school. Teetotal and non-smoking, there was an overarching sense of moderation in all things – wartime austerity without the war. I was brought up with something not dissimilar, and can still remember the sense of eternal damnation just around the corner, mixed with the whiff of furniture polish. You could either embrace the regimen, or become the rebel. Becoming a rebel was easy, but you had to be prepared to take the consequences: so Monty and Maud clashed – in all things.

Bishop Henry was away for long periods, visiting every remote corner of Tasmania, so Maud’s rule was absolute. She would beat or berate her children for any infringement of her rules, which included daily prayers, scrupulous honesty, strict time-keeping, starchy cleanliness, instinctive politeness, good table manners, and neat and accurate schoolwork. She was determined too that the children would not adopt an accent. The strictness – even cruelty – in Maud may have come from her not having had much of a childhood herself; she was married at fourteen. Without necessarily malign intent she withheld from her own children what she had been denied: affection. The eldest children, Sibyl (who died shortly after arrival in Hobart), Harold and Donald, stuck together and submitted, as did the later, younger ones – Una, Winsome, Desmond, Colin and Brian. But Bernard, always a loner, fought back. Apparently at one children’s party, when Maud was trying to make herself heard, Bernard jumped on a table and yelled: ‘Silence in the pig market, the old sow speaks first!’3

Though harsh and uncompromising, it proved an effective regime. Bernard and his siblings were brought up well by the standards of the day; as Monty later wrote: ‘We have all kept on the rails. There have been no scandals in the family.’ Eventually three would emigrate (driven away? – who knows): Harold fought in the Boer War then lived in Kenya, Donald in Vancouver and Colin in South Africa. Bernard’s own coping mechanism was emotional detachment. He appears to have persuaded himself that he was indifferent to his mother and thus impervious to her withholding of affection. Indeed, the loveless environment gave Bernard’s character a hint of a bully. He later described himself as ‘a dreadful little boy’, the ‘bad boy of the family, the rebellious one, and as a result I learnt early to stand or fall on my own’.4

The family returned to London once – for the Lambeth Bishops’ Conference of 1897 – and left Tasmania for good in 1901, when Bernard was thirteen. His father had been asked to take on the post of Secretary to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and the family returned to the capital reluctantly. Bernard followed his elder brothers to St Paul’s School, a daytime fee-paying college in Hammersmith, where the Montgomerys had settled, to which Bernard would cycle each day. Money was the chief reason that prevented Bishop Henry, an Old Harrovian, from sending Bernard to his alma mater, but St Paul’s was in many ways an obvious choice for an impoverished cleric with many sons. Founded in the City of London in 1509 as St Paul’s Cathedral School, the high-achieving institution had relocated to Hammersmith in 1884, and was able to offer an important churchman like the bishop a substantial discount on school fees.5 Between 1902–21, five of the six Montgomery brothers attended St Paul’s. Sadly, Bernard’s younger brother, Desmond, died of a medical complaint whilst a pupil there in 1909.

Monty (or ‘Monkey’, his nickname at St Paul’s, a reference maybe to his agility and his sense of mischief) found the experience of a large public school unsettling at first. He was put in an ‘Army Class’ of ten boys, that is, for the least academically inclined (Churchill, too, was the product of an ‘Army Class’, at Harrow), but took advantage of St Pauls’ expansive playing fields. By nature short and slight, ‘Monkey’ was fit and wiry. Rebelling against his mother in Hobart and at Moville had usually meant messing around out-of-doors and he found he was well suited to games, playing for the school Cricket XI and captaining the Rugby XV. To no one’s great surprise he also became a prefect.

Fears of aerial bombing caused St Paul’s to be evacuated to Berkshire in 1939 and the buildings were requisitioned by the War Department. In an odd Brideshead-esque quirk of fate, St Paul’s School would become the headquarters of 21st Army Group in the early months of 1944, and its commander, one B. L. Montgomery, would take great delight in demanding the same study his headmaster had occupied nearly forty years before. Neither set of buildings, Monty’s Chiswick home at ‘Bishopsbourne’, 19, Bolton Road, W4, or St Paul’s School, exists today: the former fell victim to the Luftwaffe, the latter was demolished in an act of 1960s architectural vandalism when the school was rehoused in Barnes.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1907, ‘Monkey’ passed the entrance exam to Sandhurst (72nd out of 177 candidates) and in January 1907, at the age of nineteen, began his military career at the Royal Military College. He apparently decided on the army to spite his parents who were pushing hard for the Church as his career.6 An Army career was probably, however, not a conscious choice for Bernard (the nickname seems not to have accompanied him), but recognition that he was no academic and enjoyed sports and the outdoors life. In Edwardian Britain, public school education coupled with a lack of private income invariably pointed towards a career in the Church or Empire; the Church of England favoured bookish, brainy types, but the Empire required fit young men who were brave and resourceful. If Bernard had developed a coping mechanism in Tasmania that drew him away from his family, particularly his mother, it was accentuated by his departure for Sandhurst. From here on he would be a stranger, only intruding occasionally into the lives of the younger members of the Montgomery clan, usually Una, Winsome or Brian.

The Royal Military College, Sandhurst had been producing officers since 1802 and by Montgomery’s day it was the main route to gaining a commission – though gunner and engineer officers had been educated separately at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich since 1741. Most of Monty’s superiors and Regular contemporaries were Sandhurst-educated (Douglas Haig had passed out from the college in 1883 and Winston Churchill in December 1894). Montgomery’s prowess on the playing fields soon elevated him to the Rugby XV. St Paul’s had prepared him admirably and within the first few weeks – the most testing of times, when a cadet needs quickly to find his feet – Monty ascended the first rung of gentleman cadet promotion, to lance corporal. Sandhurst then was very much a finishing school for young, moneyed swells and Bernard ascribed his progress not necessarily to zeal, but to the stinginess of his mother’s financial allowance which prevented him from engaging in the traditional outside attractions of late-night carousing in London, fine wines and fast women, and forced him to knuckle down and work. Monty soon emerged as the leader of a Flashman-like gang of hearties in his cadet company, the ‘Bloody B’, who eventually attacked an ‘A’ Company cadet changing in his room. This was ragging of the public school variety (from where nearly every cadet had arrived), which not infrequently drew blood. Whilst others held the cadet, Montgomery set the poor unfortunate’s shirt tails alight, with the result that the cadet was hospitalised and Montgomery held culpable for this excess.

What to do with Gentleman Cadet Montgomery? On the one hand, he was doing well at Sandhurst and his infantry regiment, the 6th of Foot, the Royal Warwickshires, were eager to have him; on the other, he had broken the rules and offended the authorities’ sense of fair play, everything that Thomas Hughes, Matthew Arnold and his own father-in-law, Dean Farrar, had stood for. At this juncture Maud took a hand in her son’s future (the only recorded time when she proactively intervened on his behalf) and came down from London to plead Bernard’s case. Bishop Henry’s then heady status as Prelate of the Knightly Order of St Michael and St George* meant that Bernard’s behaviour threatened a public scandal, and there was a very real possibility of him being sent down and thrown out of the army. In the event he lost his lance corporal’s stripe and was held back a term, to graduate in a sea of martial music, flashing swords, spiked helmets, scarlet tunics and gold braid, in the summer of 1908.

In his memoirs, Monty singles out a Major Forbes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (rather than Maud) as the person who saved his bacon; or it may have been Captain George Crossman of the West Yorkshire Regiment, CO of the Company of Gentleman Cadets. The Commandant, Colonel William Capper (whose high-flying brother, Thompson Capper, would die as a divisional commander on the Western Front in 1915), would also have been involved. At any rate, someone perceived that Bernard possessed the ‘right stuff’, but needed taking down a peg or two. In his memoirs Monty was quite open about the crime and consequent punishment, perhaps with an unconscious sense of in-built religious self-flagellation.

Achievement at Sandhurst was measured by the final examination results, and for Monty especially the prize was India. At this time, a private income (in addition to salary) of £100 a year for infantry officers or £400 for those in the cavalry was a basic requirement for junior officers based in England (a multiplication factor of at least sixty brings these figures into the twenty-first century). Monty was desperate for a posting to India, where an officer could live well on relatively modest pay. Making sure that one’s pay plus any family allowance at least equalled one’s bill for fine claret and cigars at the end of each month was a huge concern to those like the impecunious Monty.

Accordingly he set his sights whilst at Sandhurst on getting into a British-officered Indian Army regiment, which, funded by the Indian War Office, paid more than a prohibitively expensive regiment in England. He was quite specific about the money issue: he could not afford mess life except in India. Money went further there and officers could ride government-supplied mounts (riding was obligatory for all officers in all armies in this era), though buying one’s own, or several, was infinitely preferable. In this much-parodied era there were regimentally sponsored race meetings, shooting parties and the whole business of dressing for dinner each evening in the mess, when the silver came out and the regiment’s band played stirring melodies through the meal. In cavalry regiments, the best Indian soldier in the troop or platoon had the honour of unravelling his regimentally striped turban around his officers’ midriff before dinner, hence the origin of the cummerbund.

Montgomery just missed out on one of these Indian Army vacancies, but was then placed high enough (36th out of 150) to be sure of acceptance for his next choice, a British Army regiment, with one of its two battalions stationed in India. His choice fell on the old Sixth of Foot, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. With no personal connections to the regiment (the various regiments still prefer some kind of personal connectivity today), he is alleged to have made his choice based on their antelope cap badge. But the real reason was the location. Thus, in December 1908, he joined the Royal Warwicks’ 1st Battalion at Peshawar on India’s North West Frontier, with two other newly minted second lieutenants.

Monty later claimed that his first taste of alcohol had been on arrival in his regiment’s mess at Peshawar: ‘a young officer was soon taught to drink. I have always disliked alcohol since’, but it seems incredible that, the high jinks of Sandhurst considered, drink hadn’t surfaced earlier in his life. This, however, was Monty speaking in his seventies, conscious of his teetotal reputation and omitting to recall, as we shall discover, that he later found alcohol extremely welcome in the trenches of the Western Front.

Monty appears to have made little impression on his new battalion. Hardly challenged mentally, he embraced inter-regimental sports, excelled at hockey and cricket, and hunted with the Peshawar Vale Hounds on an Indian cavalry charger named Probyn. Athleticism was (and remains) one way of gaining rapid acceptance in an all-male, insular society, and this was where Monty could achieve. Though his capacity for joining in the merry japes of his colleagues was, as at Sandhurst, limited by finances, he once more offset this latter disappointment by study. He learnt Urdu and Pushtu and organised mountain warfare training in the nearby hill station of Cherat. It was at this stage that his talents for teaching, training and communication (no doubt inherited from his father bishop) came to the fore. To his fellow officers he may have also come across as a bit of a swot, or as Alun Chalfont put it, having him in the mess ‘was a little like finding a player in the Gentleman’s XI’. From this time, to the end of his days, Monty never appeared wealthy, with his preference for old sweaters and corduroy trousers. He was certainly serious at a time when seriousness was at best unusual and at worst discouraged, though in Monty’s case, this may simply have been a way of disguising his financial embarrassment. In choosing to stand apart, we might also divine hints of his natural aloofness and arrogance. Whatever the underlying causes, the seriousness paid off. The army always needs good organisers and he was made assistant adjutant on promotion to lieutenant in 1910.

What India seemed to bring out in Monty was an aversion to a certain type of officer:

Soldiering in India seemed to me at that time to lack something. I saw a good deal of the Indian Army. The men were splendid; they were natural soldiers and as good a material as anyone could want. The British officers were not all so good … An expression heard frequently was that so-and-so was a good mixer. A good mixer of drinks, I came to believe, for it soon appeared to me that a good mixer was a man who had never been known to refuse a drink.7

There is prejudice aplenty seeping out of this passage as surely as the slice of lemon flavouring a good gin and tonic. Monty was never a good mixer, being always slightly shy and awkward in social situations. He refers warmly to the British soldiery in India, though they were certainly no better than their officers, and frequently worse in a drink-fuelled hot climate, where they still managed to enjoy, and abuse, a status considerably higher than that which soldiering in Blighty would have offered. Further evidence of Monty’s attempts to integrate with his men are the several tattoos, rarely caught in photographs, he had applied to both his forearms. A butterfly amongst other designs adorned his right arm and an antelope (inspired by the regimental cap badge) was applied to his left. Discreet tattooing of the limbs or torso remains a tradition amongst British sailors and soldiers to this day, but is more closely associated with other ranks than officers. Perhaps embarrassed by this early adventure into attention-seeking, as he rose in seniority, Monty went to great lengths to conceal his tattoos by keeping his sleeves rolled down in the desert and elsewhere. They are only visible in photographs of Bernard in old age, when, frankly, he didn’t care. But Monty’s real problem with British India was that he believed he would never be taken seriously there: that with little money and few apparent social graces, he could never compete. And he came to despise that of which he could not be part. Indeed it was with some relief, as he later observed, that his battalion, after a spell of duty in Bombay, returned to England in January 1913.8

It was whilst in India, in the insular world of early-twentieth-century society, that Monty first encountered Germans. In December 1910, the cruiser Gneisenau put into Bombay with the Crown Prince on board. Montgomery was told to organise a football match against the crew – and to make sure the Gneisenau’s team won. Monty’s earliest brush with diplomacy resulted in the Germans being thrashed ‘by forty to nothing I think – I wasn’t taking any chances with those bastards’, he later recalled.

2

The Swabian

JOHANNES ERWIN EUGEN ROMMEL was born in Heidenheim-an-der-Brenz on 15 November 1891 and baptised two days later. The provincial town, then of about 15,000 inhabitants, lies deep in the state of Württemberg, one of the twenty-six kingdoms, duchies and independent states that merged to form the German nation in 1871. Thus Rommel had allegiance to two kings: the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in Berlin, and another Wilhelm II, hereditary King of Württemberg, who had acceded to his throne only some forty days before Erwin’s birth. In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm I died in Berlin and was succeeded by his son, the liberal Frederick III, who spent all ninety-nine days of his reign battling throat cancer before succumbing on 15 June. His successor was his twenty-nine-year-old son, Wilhelm II, who would prove to be the architect of so many of Europe’s twentieth-century woes.

1891 seems to have been as unremarkable as 1887: a quiet, but promising year, which witnessed the start of building the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia and the opening of Scotland Yard in London as the capital’s police headquarters. Reigning as chancellor since the young German state had been founded, Otto von Bismarck had resigned the year before at the insistence of the new Kaiser, and the Fatherland as a whole mourned the passing of Generalfeldmarschall Helmuth von Moltke, architect of the 1870 victory over France. The peacetime German army then numbered 506,000 officers and men (far outstripping Britain’s regular force which totalled 144,000 in the same year), whilst the Imperial navy included seventy-seven major warships.

Rommel was accompanied into the world by an impressive clutch of future generals. Amongst his contemporaries was a second field marshal-in-waiting, Walther Model, who, like Erwin, was a schoolmaster’s son. Ritter Wilhelm von Thoma, who served with him in both world wars, and Frido von Senger und Etterlin, later a Rhodes Scholar and the defender of Monte Cassino (who was a subordinate of Erwin’s in 1940), were also born in 1891; as was Erich Marcks, the one-legged commander of LXXXIV Corps in Normandy in 1944. Three other important future subordinates were very close to Erwin in age, belonging to the 1892 vintage: Ludwig Crüwell and Walther Nehring, who both commanded the Afrika Korps at different times, and the Bavarian former sergeant major, Sepp Dietrich, Hitler’s one-time bodyguard and by 1944 an SS corps commander in Normandy and unlikely friend, labelled by some as ‘decent, but stupid’.

The year also ushered in two future British field marshals: Harold Alexander, the third son of an Irish earl, who would be every bit as responsible for Rommel’s downfall as Montgomery. The other was Bill Slim, born to lower-middle-class parents in urban Birmingham, who in due course would be commissioned into the same regiment as Monty. Bracketing Rommel in age were two important future RAF adversaries: Arthur Tedder, who would become Eisenhower’s deputy in 1944, born in 1890, and Trafford Leigh-Mallory, born 1892, future supremo of the Allied air forces on D-Day. Indeed the four-year bracket 1887–91 would see the birth of the lion’s share of commanders who would rise to prominence in the Second World War, including some 404 British and colonial wartime generals. These years also witnessed the arrival of 399 future US army generals, including Eisenhower, Brereton, Devers, Gerow, Middleton, Patch, Simpson and Spaatz. With de Gaulle, we must add the names of the Frenchmen Juin and de Lattre de Tassigny, 169 future Russian generals and Chiang Kai-shek of China. Born right amidst this galaxy of future stars on 20 April 1889 was an altogether more sinister entity, christened with the single forename Adolf.

The nation Bismarck had forged (it was never the Kaiser’s in the way it was Bismarck’s) was an erratic assembly of many German-speaking states. Prussia was dominant militarily, but one of the largest regions that made up the south-west of the country was Swabia. A mediaeval duchy, since incorporated into the larger kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg, Swabia still had a culture and dialect all of its own, which Erwin Rommel enjoyed speaking. It was claimed that a typical Swabian was tight with money, crafty, reserved, level headed – and loyal. In those far-off days Swabians were hardly regarded as cosmopolitan, but in Rommel’s era they were esteemed fighters, like the Irish. But Swabia had long since ceased to exist as a political entity, so the wily, cunning south-western Germans found their voice as Württembergers. Their monarch retained a degree of political autonomy, ran his own railway and postal services, and appointed officers to his own army corps, albeit incorporated into the larger Prussian army.

These contexts are important in understanding Montgomery and Rommel: both regarded themselves as outsiders; both were scions of regions renowned for producing generations of warriors – Ireland and Swabia. This sense of being on the periphery of the military establishment gives us one of many true parallels for both leaders.

Rommel is a surname that crops up all over central Europe in every Germanic state and countries ranging between Denmark, Sweden and Poland.* The Inspector General of the Polish Army in 1939 was a Major General Juliusz Rómmel, who went on to command the Lódz Army during the German invasion and survived five years’ subsequent captivity. One genealogist claims to have traced the family’s ancestry back as far as 1175, to the Drakenburg estate in Sweden. Some historians have even suggested a French branch of the family, the Romelles, and have attempted to link it to Normandy, the family perhaps removing themselves to Germany and elsewhere as practising Protestants following the massacres of Hugenots in 1572 and Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau, declaring Protestantism illegal. This is difficult to substantiate and may be a post-war confection, driven by the undoubted connections of the Montgomery clan to Normandy.

The German-born Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia, certainly attracted over 100,000 German settlers in the late eighteenth century, including several impoverished Rommel clans, to European Russia. A century later, anti-German sentiment encouraged their onward migration to Canada and the United States. The Rommel family today is not small and forebears from every state, duchy and principality in central Europe were caught up in the great Germanic migration to America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 Some Rommels are recorded as migrating to Louisiana as early as 1720, but many arrived in Pennsylvania one hundred years after. Of Rommel’s direct ancestry, at least one of his father’s siblings emigrated to America. Many of the millions of descendants of European émigrés were eventually drafted in both world wars, producing the scenario of Corporal Bobbie Jack Rommel, from California, of 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, landing in Normandy on D-Day, to do battle with his third cousin, Erwin.

Rommel’s father, also Erwin, was born in 1860, the son of a schoolmaster, a vocation he in due course followed in the attractive little provincial town of Heidenheim, thirty miles north of Ulm. Erwin (senior) was one of four – Georg, Johanne and a sister, Greta. Whilst some of his siblings migrated to the United States, ‘Herr Professor’ Erwin seemed content to stay in Heidenheim teaching mathematics, as had his father. In 1886 he married Helene, daughter of a local civic dignitary, Regierungs-Präsident Karl von Luz. They enjoyed a happy marriage which resulted in five children: a daughter, Helene, Manfred who died young, and three further sons, Erwin, Karl and Gerhard.2 Although, like all Germans, the professor was obliged to undergo compulsory military service (in 1880 he was a lieutenant in the Württemberg artillery), there was no military tradition in the family. According to Brigadier Desmond Young, the British author responsible for the first and bestselling biography of Rommel, the professions of young Erwin’s siblings indicated ‘a respectable Swabian family of moderate means, far removed in education and environment from the Prussian officer class’. Helene never married and became, like her father and grandfather, a teacher in Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg, where her nephew was eventually mayor. Karl became an army pilot and was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Knight’s Cross of the Württemberg Military Merit Order in September 1917, but caught malaria whilst serving with the air force in Turkey and Mesopotamia and was invalided out of military service. He produced two sons, Jürgen, Wilhelm and a daughter, Ilse. Gerhard became an opera singer in nearby Ulm. Much later, during the Second World War, one of Erwin’s nephews joined the SS, and in 2001 a British newspaper revealed that documents in Britain’s National Archives pointed to the complicity of a Leutnant Rommel in the execution of three British prisoners of war in Italy in 1943. Erwin at least would have the foresight to forbid his own son, Manfred, from joining the organisation.3

In 1898, Herr Professor Erwin was made headmaster of the secondary school in nearby Aalen, about ten