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85 Chapter 5 The Initial Situation in Northern France 1. Change of Command: Model in the West—August 17 Model initially resisted his reassignment to France. On the evening of August 16 he received briefings at Rastenburg on the situation and the possible future developments in the West.1 In the meantime, Kluge, who had reestablished communications from the command post of the Fifth Panzer Army, was working with his two operations staffs—OB West and Army Group B—and with Jodl to deal with the problems of the withdrawal from the encirclement at Falaise.2 Even before Hitler’s written withdrawal approval arrived, Kluge had Lieutenant General Hans Speidel, the chief of staff of Army Group B, draft orders for the retrograde movements of the Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army.3 Kluge put those orders into effect.4 Apart from that, Kluge’s last actions as OB West dealt with the situation in Paris, as the area of combat operations was now in the immediate vicinity of the French metropolis.5 The various German headquarters based in and around Paris were now under heavy threat. General Blumentritt had already issued a threat alert on August 15, a day that was full of crisis situations and frantic message traffic. In his request for the authorization to transfer the various command posts, he stressed that if the situation deteriorated rapidly, the entire command and control structure in the OB West area of operations might be lost.6 Unfortunately, OB West himself deferred to Hitler’s decision on that problem, which in turn hobbled the leadership of the German Army in the West. It was not the last time that would happen. After receiving approval from the Wehrmacht High Command, Kluge ordered the displacement during the night of August 16 to 17 of the OB West command post from St. Germain to Verzy, with the forward command post at Metz.7 Army Group B was supposed to move its headquarters from Margival, near Soissons, into the “Wolf’s Gorge II” command post, 86 Part 1 which had been built as a headquarters for Hitler but was never used except once, on June 17, 1944.8 The Wehrmacht High Command , however, held back on releasing the installation, preventing Army Group B headquarters from moving.9 These facts show that apart from Kluge’s noticeable feelings of resignation, he was no longer functioning as the independently acting commanding general in the west during the last few days prior to his relief. The personality of his designated successor would be the main factor in determining whether the loss of the significance of OB West’s position in the military command structure could be reversed after the command change. On August 17, Model arrived at Army Group B headquarters in La Roche-Guyon to assume supreme command in the west.10 Up to that point, Kluge had not even been informed that his relief decision had been made almost two days earlier. Model gave Kluge a handwritten letter from Hitler notifying Kluge that “. . . as a result of his state of health [he] was no longer able to meet the requirements arising from the heavy burden of command in recent weeks,” and he therefore was transferred to the Führer Reserve.11 Kluge’s replacement by Model did have some parallels to Rundstedt ’s dismissal a month and a half earlier. But after his relief Rundstedt remained in Hitler’s good graces, and in September 1944 he was once again recalled to serve as OB West. The events leading up to Kluge’s dismissal, combined with the ominous final sentence in Hitler’s handwritten letter, directing that “Field Marshal von Kluge must indicate to which part of Germany he intends to go,” led Kluge to realize that the degree of suspicion against him had solidified.12 There seemed to be a definite linkage between the new phase in operational command which began as Model took over, the organization of the withdrawal movement in the west, and Kluge’s personal catastrophe. Fully aware that the crisis of the German Army in the West would be blamed on his failure, and only guessing what was in store for him,13 Kluge committed suicide on the way back to Germany on August 19.14 Model came to France with preconceived notions, much as his predecessor had.15 Even before he was able to assess the situation personally by visiting the front, Model told his two chiefs of staff, Blumentritt...

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