The Three Vons

One of the most extraordinary obscurities of World War II is Germany's team of top field generals. They have conquered most of Europe, but very few people could have been blamed for not recognizing their names when Adolf Hitler praised them last week for their work in Russia: Field Marshals Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, Fedor von Bock, Wilhelm Joseph Franz Ritter von Leeb.

These three have been a team ever since 1935, when the Nazi Party reorganized the Reichswehr and divided the country into three Group Commands. Rundstedt held Group I (based on Berlin), Leeb held II (Cassel), and Bock held III (Dresden). Only two Army groups attacked Poland, but two of these three commanded them: Bock in the north, Rundstedt in the south.

Against France the team was together again: Leeb on the left, Rundstedt in the center, Bock on the right. In Russia, Leeb is attacking Leningrad in the north, Bock has been assigned Moscow in the center, and Rundstedt is working on the Ukraine to the south.

If there is a type of top-ranking German general, these three are it. They look almost exactly alike (see cut}--heavily lined face, aquiline nose, snapping snake-eyes, lips tight and bitter. They are old: Rundstedt is 65, Leeb will be next month, Bock is 60. They are stiffly aristocratic: all three sport vons. None of them thinks much of the Nazis: Leeb and Rundstedt both retired temporarily in 1938, reportedly for political reasons, and ascetic Bock hates sensuous Goring. But all of them love soldiering and have a consuming sense of patriotic duty.

Rundstedt, the oldest, is also the best. Before the Nazis came to power, he was a stanch royalist, a faithful Hindenburg man. Now he is the Nazis' high priest of strategy. Belittlers of Chief of the High Command Wilhelm Keitel used to say that Keitel was such a coxcomb that he wouldn't even listen to Rundstedt. Rundstedt is easily the most experienced German commander. He alone of the present crop of generals was an Army Corps Chief of Staff in World War I. He will go down in German history as a hero because it was he who devised the break-through at Sedan early last summer, and it was his tank generals, Guderian and Kleist, who executed it.

Leeb is the most consciously aristocratic, the most austere. Because he wrote a Chronicle of the Leeb Family, he has been called the Family-Tree General. His friend Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm List, who commanded the Balkan campaign, once said: "If Leeb ever tried to smile, it would crack his face." His coldness has deprived him of friends, but he is respected as an upright professional soldier. He lost a son in Poland.

Bock is the most fanatical. His fanaticism is military, not political. Leading an army into the Sudetenland, he took his twelve-year-old son, dressed in a sailor suit, along in his car "to impress on his son the beauty and exhilaration that lie in soldiering." German officers call him der Sterber, the dier, because of his great fondness for holding forth on the glories of dying for the Fatherland. It used to be generally said in Berlin that he had Russian blood in his veins. But it was blue blood, not Red.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.