Word: gerdes
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...