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Normandy battlefield, and shackled by Hitler’s “no withdrawal” orders (“Every man shall fight and fall where he stands”), Von Rundstedt’s straining lines cracked everywhere.  Desperately he plugged the gaps, but hard as his men fought and counterattacked, the outcome was never seriously in doubt.  Von Rundstedt could neither “drive the invaders into the sea” nor “annihilate them” (the words were Hitler’s).
    On the night of July 1, at the height of the Normandy battle, Hitler’s chief of staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, called Von Rundstedt and plaintively asked, “What shall we do?”  Character- istically blunt, Von Rundstedt snapped, “End the war, you fools.  What else can you do?” Hitler’s comment on hearing the remark was mild.  “The old man has lost his nerve and can’t master the situation any longer.  He’ll have to go.”  Twenty-four hours later, in a polite handwritten note, Hitler informed Von Rundstedt that, “in consideration of your health and of the increased exertions to be expected in the near future,” he was relieved of command.
    Von Rundstedt, the senior and most dependable field marshal in the Wehrmacht, was incredulous.  For the five years of war his military genius had served the Third Reich well.  In 1939, when Hitler cold-bloodedly attacked Poland, thereby igniting the conflict that eventually engulfed the world, Von Rundstedt had clearly demonstrated the German formula for conquest—Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”)—when his Panzer spearheads reached the outskirts of Warsaw in less than a week.  One year later, when Hitler turned west and with devastating speed overwhelmed most of western Europe, Von Rundstedt was in charge of an entire Panzer army.  And in 1941 he was in the forefront again when Hitler attacked Russia.  Now, outraged at the jeopardy to his career and reputation, Von Rundstedt told his chief of staff, Major General Gunther Blumentritt, that he had been “dismissed in disgrace by an amateur strategist.”  That “Bohemian corporal,” he fumed, had used “my age and ill health as an excuse to relieve me in order to have a scapegoat.”  Given a free hand, Von Rundstedt had planned a slow withdrawal to the German frontier, during which, as he outlined his plans to Blumentritt, he would have “exacted a terrible price for every foot of ground given up.”  But, as he had said to his staff many times, because of the constant “tutelage from above,” about the only authority he had as OB West was “to change the guard in front of the gate.”  * * “Von Rundstedt was hurt by the implication in Hitler’s letter that he had “requested” relief,” the late General Blumentritt told me in an interview.  “Some of us at Headquarters actually thought he had, but this was not so.  Von Rundstedt denied that he had ever asked to be relieved—or that he had ever thought of doing so.  He was extremely angry—so angry in fact that he swore he would never again take a command under Hitler.  I knew he did not mean it for, to Von Rundstedt, military obedience was unconditional and absolute.”
    From the moment of his recall and his arrival at the end of
    August at the Rastenburg Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”), as it was named by Hitler, Von Rundstedt, at the F@uhrer’s invitation, attended the daily briefing conference.  Hitler, according to the Deputy Chief of Operations General Walter Warlimont, greeted his senior field marshal warmly, treating him with “unwonted diffidence and respect.”  Warlimont also noted that throughout the long sessions Von Rundstedt simply sat “motionless and monosyllabic.”  * The precise, practical field marshal had nothing to say.  He was appalled by the situation.  * Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939-45, p. 477.
    The briefings clearly showed that in the east the Red Army now held a front more than 1,400 miles long, from Finland in the north to the Vistula in Poland,