General Fritz Bayerlein is best known as chief of staff for Field Marshal Rommel’s Africa Corps in North Africa. Ironically, this is probably the least interesting thing about Bayerlein’s wartime career.

Those who are familiar with the German General Staff and its workings understand that in many ways the most important figure in the command hierarchy is not the commander, but rather the operations chief (what we would call the S-3 or G-3, depending on the level of the command, and the Germans called the Ia). In admittedly over-simplified terms, the commander is the guy who points at the horizon and the Ia is the guy who makes it happen (and about half the time tells the commander which horizon to point at). This is a somewhat more important position than in the US hierarchy – not to take anything away from our own S-3s.

Bayerlein began the war as a major, the Ia for 10th Panzer Division in Poland. By France he had moved up to General Heinz Guderian’s Ia at XIX Panzer Corps and stayed his Ia when Guderian was bumped up to command a panzer group for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Think about that for a moment. Heinz Guderian has been the intellectual (if not ideological) role model for generations of gifted armor officers, in large part due to two campaigns: the drive across France to the English Channel and the drive into Byelorussia and the destruction of the western frontier armies of the Soviet Union. Both of those campaigns were planned and executed by Fritz Bayerlein.

Then in October of 1941 Bayerlein was transferred to Africa, and the rest, as they say, is history. He was evacuated from Africa due to illness in May of 1943 and recuperated for several months. In October he took command of 3rd Panzer Division and of the elite Panzer Lehr division in January of 1944, leading it for a year on both the eastern front and in the Battle of the Bulge. He ended the war in command of LIII Army Corps, which surrendered in the Ruhr Pocket.

But a tantalizing question remains: why was one of the most brilliant and successful operations officers in the German Army transferred to Africa while the campaign in the east still hung very much in the balance?

To protect him from the Gestapo.

(Continued in Part II)

About the Author: The major landmarks in Frank's historical interests range from ancient Persia through the Crimean War, World War II, and the modern U.S. Armed Forces, with a lot of stops in between. Frank is fascinated by the unusual, the overlooked, and the surprising. He is the New York Times number one best-selling author of the Desert Shield Fact Book (1991) and he is currently writing an historical novel on Alexander's conquest of Persia – from the Persian point of view.

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