Facing the Channel

(See Cover)

By day the invasion coast, from the Hook of Holland to the Breton Peninsula, hums and crackles like a great anthill with the Germans' building and rebuilding. Workmen, slave and free, throw up great strong points of concrete and steel. The spirit of the great Fritz Todt, who built the wondrously interlaced strong points in the unused Westwall, lies over the oppressed land. German gunners stand at their stations in fortress and foxhole, ready to spin the threads of their fire into the tightly woven fabric of resistance to invasion. British bombers and fighters pluck the threads and blast the weavers, whipping across the Channel in great swarms. Every day there is rebuilding to be done. Every day calls for more characteristically German refinement of a defense system that can never be woven too stoutly, nor extended too deeply into the interior.

But by night the invasion coast drops into sullen, soundless darkness. Below the earth, behind great blackout curtains, men still work with concrete and steel. But the hard-eyed German gunners behind the barbed wire on the beaches, the spectacled technicians at the radio detectors on the cliffs, no longer feel the spirit of Todt, the fortress builder. At night--almost every night--there is fighting to be done, and any night may bring the first crashing thrust of invasion. As soldiers always do, men on the late watches talk of home, of furloughs and women, of comrades on other fields. But the spirit that stands beside them in the darkness is the spirit of their commander: austere, 66-year-old Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief of all mobile defense and garrison troops (including air forces) in Holland, Belgium and Occupied France.

Headquarters, Sedan. Marshal von Rundstedt is seldom on the coast by night. Slim, immaculate, the apotheosis of the old Junker class that has furnished the upstart Hitler with his military brains, Gerd von Rundstedt stays by night close to his headquarters at Sedan.

There, where France's shame had been twice compounded--in 1870 when Napoleon III surrendered to Moltke, in 1940 when Rundstedt's army poured through a gaping rent in Corap's line--Rundstedt sits with his staff. On the breast of his tunic gleam bright ribbons won in that and many another triumph--Poland, Russia, the Lowlands--and from his high collar dangles the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. But Gerd von Rundstedt has little time for dreams of past glories.

He is in a position that no Prussian likes, or wants to keep. He is on the defensive. As long as the Russian war holds the best of the German Army on the Eastern Front, as long as that hooligan and instinctive soldier Rommel needs help in Egypt, Rundstedt, the carefully cultivated flower of the old German military system, has to hold off the enemy in the north. Germany's most respected soldier, her soundest staff officer, her No. 1 field commander, he has to sit behind his bunkers and parry the enemy's thrusts. He may never again lead an offensive.

Plan for Defense. In the lexicon of Rundstedt's Hohenzollern-made class, there is no such word as "won't." When Adolf Hitler, whom few Junker officers regard with kindness, ordered straight-backed Rundstedt to a secondary area, and a defensive job to boot, no old-line officer could have been surprised that he took the job. Or that he did it well.

It had to be done well, for there is more than the threat of invasion, more than the continual harrying of the R.A.F., to make life complicated for the Germans in occupied Europe. Small Commando raids have to be met almost nightly, and occasionally big ones--such as last week at Dieppe (see p. 26).

The Commandos slip or bash their way inside the steel arc of Rundstedt's defenses to feel out German techniques. But old Rundstedt can tell himself that it has been an even trade. By their raiding, the British have had to give away their own techniques: how they carry tanks on barges, what kind of weapons they favor, what proportion of artillery they use. And the British can be sure that the Germans are profiting by what they learn.

Rundstedt's job has been to put muscle on a defense skeleton. He was lucky in that his defense area had magnificent communications. It was criss-crossed with highways and railroads (see map, p. 29), dotted with airdromes, some snatched from the French, some built by the Germans in their months of hesitancy after Dunkirk. With these advantages Rundstedt has organized a fluid defense, well but tressed on its front by strong points, backed by forces that could be whipped to any threatened point.

His headquarters at Sedan lie right where they should lie, roughly halfway between the extremities of his danger zone. They are far enough from German headquarters in Paris to be out of the way of the Gestapo and the politicians (whom he despises, as do most of his class). They are close enough for an easy trip to the periodic conferences he must have with the people he despises, but who are part of the Nazi machinery that must keep the conquered peoples down.

Defender's Assets. To meet the British wherever they may strike, Rundstedt has a big force, with impressive mobility. Under his command are 30 to 40 infantry divisions (15,000 men each), which he has disposed along the beaches and in rear areas. Ten which have long battle experience are probably kept at vital communication points, to be whisked where they are needed. Far to his rear, in the Reich itself, are 50 to 55 more divisions, some still training, all relatively untested. They are reserves.

Rundstedt has been, and still is, short in one all-important defense. Taking a calculated risk, the German High Command has sent most of its air power to the Russian and Egyptian fronts. Rundstedt was reported last week to have had only 300 fighter planes and 200 bombers to deal with the Dieppe raid. Some of these he had to call down from Holland.

He is lucky, however, in that his Luftwaffe commander is jowly, droop-mouthed Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle. Fat as he is, Sperrle knows how to move fast, how to stretch an air force and still get the most out of it. One of Goering's white-haired (before he lost it) boys, Hugo Sperrle commanded the famed Condor Legion in Spain, did wonders with short and ill-assorted equipment. He went through Poland, the Lowlands, France. He knows what air war is about.

Rundstedt's biggest problem is how to concentrate his forces--particularly his Panzer forces with their heavy firepower--at any section of a 700-mile coastline, any day, any night. He has three Panzer divisions, and that is not enough to cover the entire coast against a major attack anywhere. But Panzers have mobility, and Rundstedt has placed them where they can use it. One of them is probably stationed near Rennes, for a quick dash up the roads to any threatened point in the Brest-St.-Malo-Cherbourg sector. Another is stationed near Amiens, has the Havre-Dieppe-Boulogne line to back up (last week it dashed to Dieppe to meet the Canadians). The third is reported to be quartered at Ghent, covers the Calais-Ostend-Flushing zone.

Made to Pattern. For administering his vastly complicated domain, with its endless problems of supply, intelligence, defense against air raids and life among the unpredictable conquered, Gerd von Rundstedt was born and raised. Facing him and others of his pattern--Junkers Bock, Leeb, Reichenau--the democratic world can be thankful that by now the mold is probably broken. It is unlikely that Adolf Hitler's politics-ridden machine can ever produce the kind of officer that the Reich, from Moltke to Kaiser Wilhelm, poured forth in dazzling profusion.

Of the last vintage, Rundstedt is among the best. He was born, as one should be, in Prussia, to a family which for generations had glorified the sword and service to the Fatherland, and nothing else. His father was an aristocrat and a general. So would be his son.

Gerd von Rundstedt got his first military training in swank cadet schools, where stiff-backed officers and crop-headed noncoms broke young men and rebuilt them to the Army pattern. He was a captain and company commander when World War I began, went to the front with a crack infantry regiment. He distinguished himself. With his background and training he could not have done anything else. But he also showed a fine soldier's brain, and when the war ended he was chief of staff of an army corps, a higher leap than any other German general now fighting had achieved.

When Adolf Hitler was still a mousy plotter, Gerd von Rundstedt was already one of the Reich's first soldiers. Impersonally affable, yet detached and consciously superior, he was not a man to let other officers call him by his first name or use the familiar Du. He was known far & wide, and with vast respect, as der General.

During the Prussian parliamentary crisis in the summer of 1932, Rundstedt took charge of Berlin on Hindenburg's order to see that order was kept. His reward was command of Army Group I, with headquarters in Berlin. He was still in command in 1935 when the hollow-cheeked, ascetic Leeb took over Group II (based on Kassel) and the chill-eyed, death-glorifying Bock became commander of Group III (Dresden).

There was prophecy in this alignment, but its fulfillment was delayed. Rundstedt was like Bock and Leeb, but there were other variations from the Junker pattern. Broad-faced Brauchitsch truckled to Hitler, became Commander in Chief of the German Army in 1938. Jaunty, rakehell Keitel made compromises, became Chief of the Supreme Command. Haider became Chief of the General Staff.

Rundstedt announced that he was ill and retired. He returned to service only when the invasion of Poland was in the planning. It was the kind of war the Junkers love because it was to be a swift stab without warning, crushing, yet almost daintily precise.

War Horses. Now the horses of war were ready to ride. Bock took over the northern group of armies on the Polish border, Rundstedt the southern. Against the bewildered Poles, with their pennoned lances and their military roots still in the '90s, the two generals had little more than maneuver exercise. But they took their medals and they wore them. And Rundstedt, the exquisite, stayed in Poland as military administrator, saw and approved the massacre of civilians, the wholesale deportation of families, without ruffling one of his neatly parted hairs.

In France the same pair was back again! Bock on the right, Rundstedt in the center. Now Leeb was with them. He commanded the left, and Germany had its greatest trio in the field. Their work had improved; Poland had taught them much. And when the French campaign was over, there was still more to learn.

This time it was Russia. Now Leeb took the left, assailed Leningrad. Bock took the center, headed for Moscow. Rundstedt took the right and headed for Rostov. This time, in a campaign against which the Junker clique was reported to have fought and been overruled, the trio failed to do the job.

In the failure they could tell themselves, for whatever it was worth to their professional pride, that they had done a superb job of soldiering. It was just that Hitler had asked for too much before snow fell. All of them, and many another Junker, went out in the period of midwinter madness when Hitler himself took over the command.

When the madness passed, Bock went back on the Russian front: he had Rundstedt's old southern sector, and this time knifed through and past Rostov. So did Leeb, in his old Leningrad sector. "Der General" went back to harness, too, and der Fuehrer had honored him with one of the Reich's most important but least thankful commands. In France, at the first, it was quiet and there was much building to do. Now there are more invasion barges on the beaches, more gunfire in the night, and the skies are laced with the bright, fiery tracers of antiaircraft.

From the front of the elegant, ruthlessly cynical Rundstedt, quiet has departed. Even the soldiers of enemy nations had grudgingly to admit that der General must be pleased. This was what he had been born for. This was the way to win medals and the adulation of other soldiers. This was better than retirement for an old horse that would be restless in pasture. Let the politicians worry about what came after the war. Let the theologians worry about what came after that.

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