Question: How many army groups did von Rundstedt command?
About the article "Invasion of Normandy", section "Armoured reserves".

Candidate passages:
Germany used two army groups to invade Poland in 1939: Army Group North and Army Group South.
In this campaign Army Group South was led by Gerd von Rundstedt and his chief of staff Erich von Manstein. 
World War II.
German invasions.
On 7 May 1939, Blumentritt submitted to his superiors a working plan for the German Invasion of Poland.
At this time, he was assigned to the "Oberkommando des Heeres" (Army High Command; OKH), and formed along with von Manstein and "Generalfeldmarshall" Gerd von Rundstedt a "Working Staff" for the development of a plan for the invasion.
The plan he submitted was called "Fall Weiss" (Case White).
It was subsequently to be followed with little alteration.
Then on 2 September 1939, Blumentritt was transferred to the general staff of Army Group South (one of the two German Army Groups to carry out the invasion) in Silesia under von Rundstedt.
This collaboration began his long and intimate friendship with von Runstedt, which was to last for many years.
Blumentritt was von Rundstedt′s Chief of Operations, while von Manstein was Chief of Staff.
The invasion was put into motion, after some delays, on 1 September 1939, and by 6 October the entire country of Poland was subdued.
In 1940, Blumentritt—as the Operations Officer of Army Group A (again under von Rundstedt)—took part in the planning (with von Manstein and Henning von Tresckow) and execution of the invasion of France.
The plan he helped develop was called "Sichelschnitt" or "Sickle Cut", and was later referred to as the Manstein Plan.
The subsequent unmitigated success of the German "Blitzkrieg" in France and the complete collapse of the French defense shocked even the Germans.
However, as the German army closed in on complete victory, Blumentritt and von Rundstedt ignored conflicting orders from the OKH to advance on the British and French position at Dunkirk, and instead followed Adolf Hitler′s order to halt for three days, consequently allowing the evacuation of the British Forces.
Immediately after the German occupation of France, von Rundstedt, Blumentritt, and others were tasked with preparing for the invasion of Great Britain.
This plan, as handed down from high command, was designated Operation "Sea Lion".
Blumentritt helped with the details of the plan, and several exercises were carried out in preparation for it, but he never believed that it was a serious option, or that Hitler intended to carry it out.
He said that at the end of July or August "... Field-Marshal von Rundstedt was in Berlin, and Hitler stated quite clearly to him that he did not intend to carry out "Sea Lion"," and further, "By the end of September it was clear that the invasion of England was off.
"In 1941, Blumentritt, under General Günther von Kluge, was made Chief of Staff of the 4.
"Armee" and promoted to general, and despite the opposition he later professed to the plan, was involved with the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
On 18 April 1941, Blumentritt wrote:Maybe the Russians really intend to stand and fight the Germans between the western border and the Dnieper, a move which would be desirable...
Even the Imperial Army was no match for the German command, and the Russian commanders today are at an even greater disadvantage.
The shortcomings of the middle ranks are even greater...
The effects of German weapons, whose prestige has increased with the campaign against Yugoslavia, will soon be felt!
There will be fourteen days of heavy fighting.
Hopefully, by then we shall have made it.
In another memo, Blumentritt wrote:On warfare and the inner value of the Russian opponent, the dull mass had two kinds of "ideas": the tsar and God.
Today, there is neither.
Bolshevism has taken their place.
I consider that to be a weakness since I never believed that this idea means anything to the bulk of the Russian people.
That is why I do not believe that the people will be carried away by Bolshevism.
They will soon be indifferent and fatalistic.
Blumentritt′s command was part of Army Group Center, which suffered massive casualties and the 4th Army itself only narrowly escaped envelopment and annihilation by the Russians outside Moscow.
After the ultimate failure of Operation "Barbarossa" in January 1942, Blumentritt returned to Germany as Chief Quartermaster of the OKH.
Late in the year he personally recommended to his superiors that the Germans should withdraw from Stalingrad, receiving the support of Chief of Staff OKH—General Franz Halder—in this recommendation, but the idea of any withdrawal was rejected by Hitler. 
The attack began on 22 June.
Despite ample warning from intelligence sources and defectors, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Command were caught by surprise, and the Germans rapidly broke through the frontier defences, helped by their total command of the air.
But the Soviet commander in northern Ukraine, Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos, was one of the better Soviet generals, and he commanded the Red Army's largest and best-equipped force: nearly a million men and 4,800 tanks.
The Germans soon encountered stubborn resistance.
Rundstedt testified at Nuremberg: "The resistance at the frontier was not too great, but it grew continually as we advanced into the interior of the country.
Very strong tank forces, tanks of a better type, far superior to ours, appeared."
The Soviet tank armies were in fact stronger than the German panzer divisions, and in the T-34 they possessed a superior tank: Kleist called it "the finest tank in the world."
Rundstedt said after the war: "I realised soon after the attack that everything that had been written about Russia was wrong."
But at this stage of the war the Red Army "tankisti" lacked the tactical skill and experience of the German panzer commanders, and after ten days of bitter fighting Kleist's armour broke through, reaching Zhitomir, only 130 km from Kiev, on 12 July.
By 30 July the Red Army in Ukraine was in full retreat.
Rundstedt and his commanders were confident that they could seize Kiev "off the march," that is, without a prolonged siege.
Despite these successes, the campaign did not go according to plan.
The front door was "kicked in", but the Red Army was not destroyed, and the Soviet state did not collapse.
Once this became apparent, at the end of July, Hitler and his commanders had to decide how to proceed.
All the Army leaders, including Rundstedt, argued for the main thrust to be in the centre, aimed at capturing Moscow, which was not only the Soviet capital but also a major industrial and transport centre.
In this they were following their training in the Prussian military tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, who had argued that the focus of the offensive must be the enemy's "centre of gravity" ("Schwerpunkt").
But Hitler saw the war more in geopolitical than strictly strategic terms.
He wanted to seize Leningrad to close off Soviet access to the Baltic, and Ukraine and the Caucasus to secure their food resources and oil.
After a month of wrangling, Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to pause at Smolensk, while the panzer divisions were shipped to the north and the south.
After the war, the influential military writer Basil Liddell-Hart argued that this decision cost the Germans their only chance of victory in the east in 1941.
Although Rundstedt opposed this diversion of forces, he was its beneficiary as attention was shifted to the southern front.
He also benefited from disastrous decisions made by the Soviets.
On 10 July Stalin appointed his old crony Marshal Semyon Budyonny commander in the Ukraine, with orders to stop the German advance at all costs.
Budyonny ordered Kirponos to push his forces forwards to Kiev and Uman, despite the danger of encirclement, rather than withdraw and make a stand on the Dnieper.
Rundstedt therefore decided to break off the advance towards Kiev, and to direct Kleist's armour south-eastwards, towards Krivoy Rog.
By 30 July the Germans were at Kirovograd, 130 km east of Uman, cutting off the Soviet line of retreat (which had in any case been forbidden by Stalin).
Meanwhile, Schobert's 11th Army was advancing north-eastwards from Bessarabia.
On 2 August the two armies met, trapping over 100,000 Soviet troops, virtually all of whom were killed or captured.
Southern Ukraine was thus left virtually defenceless, and by 25 August, when they entered Dniepropetrovsk, the Germans had occupied everything west of the Dnieper (except Odessa, which held out until October).
Nevertheless, this had all taken longer than expected, and the Red Army was showing no signs of collapse.
Rundstedt wrote to his wife on 12 August: "How much longer?
I have no great hope that it will be soon.
The distances in Russia devour us.
"Neither the success at Uman nor what followed at Kiev would have happened had Rundstedt not backed his subordinates and resisted Hitler's interference in the conduct of the campaign.
As during the French campaign, Hitler was panicked by his own success.
By early July he was full of anxiety that the German armour was advancing too quickly, without infantry support, and that it was exposed to Soviet counter-attacks.
On 10 July Brauchitsch arrived at Rundstedt's headquarters at Brody, with instructions from Hitler that Kleist was turn south towards Vinnitsa and link up with Schobert's army there, rather than continue south-east to Kirovograd.
This would still have trapped many Soviet divisions, but it would have allowed the mass of Soviet forces at Uman and Kiev to escape.
Rundstedt defended Kleist's ability to execute the larger encirclement, and persuaded Brauchitsch that he was right.
Brauchitsch then contacted Halder, who succeeded in persuading Hitler to support Rundstedt.
This was a sign that Rundstedt still had Hitler's respect, as were Hitler's two visits to Rundstedt's armies during this period.
After Uman Budyonny's forces massed around Kiev – over 700,000 men – were left dangerously exposed, with Kleist's 1st Panzer Army regrouping to the south-east and General Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army (part of Army Group Centre) smashing General Yeromenko's Briansk Front and advancing south from Gomel in White Russia, on a line well east of Kiev.
The danger of encirclement was obvious, but Stalin stubbornly refused to consider withdrawal, despite warnings from both Budyonny and Kirponos that catastrophe was imminent.
Budyonny has been freely blamed by postwar writers for the disaster at Kiev, but it is clear that while he was out of his depth as a front commander, he warned Stalin of the danger, and was dismissed for his pains.
On 12 September Kleist crossed the Dnieper at Cherkasy heading north-east, and on 16 September his tanks linked up with Guderian's at Lokhvitsa, nearly 200 km east of Kiev.
Although many Soviet troops were able to escape eastwards in small groups, around 600,000 men – four whole armies comprising 43 divisions, nearly one-third of the Soviet Army's strength at the start of the war – were killed or captured, and the great majority of those captured died in captivity.
Kiev fell on 19 September.
Kirponos was killed in action on 20 September, shortly before resistance ceased.
Rundstedt had thus presided over one of the greatest victories in the history of warfare.
But this catastrophe for the Red Army resulted far more from the inflexibility of Stalin than it did from the talents of Rundstedt as a commander or the skill of the German Army.
David Stahel, a recent historian of the Kiev campaign, wrote: "Germany had been handed a triumph far in excess of what its exhausted armoured forces could have achieved without Stalin's obduracy and incompetence."
In fact both the German Army and the Red Army were driven more by the dictates of their respective political masters rather than by the decisions of the military professionals.
Stahel sums the situation up with his chapter heading: "Subordinating the generals: the dictators dictate."
Kirponos could have withdrawn most of his army across the Dnieper in time had Stalin allowed him to do so, and Rundstedt himself acknowledged this.
Had this happened, Rundstedt's forces would have been in no state to give chase: they were exhausted after two months of ceaseless combat.
Despite their successes, they had sustained high levels of casualties and even higher levels of loss of equipment, both of which were impossible to replace.
By September the German Army in the Soviet Union had suffered nearly 500,000 casualties.
In a statement to the Army on 15 August, Rundstedt acknowledged: "It is only natural that such great effort would result in fatigue, the combat strength of the troops has weakened and in many places there is a desire for rest."
But, said Runstedt: "We must keep pressure on the enemy for he has many more reserves than we."
This was a remarkable admission so early in the Russian campaign, and it showed that Rundstedt was already well aware of how unrealistic the German belief in a quick victory had been. 
Commanded by Feldmarshal Gerd von Rundstedt 
On 25 October, Rundstedt took up his new post as commander of Army Group A, facing the French border in the Ardennes mountains sector, and based in Koblenz.
To his north Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock faced the Dutch and Belgian borders, while to his south Army Group C under General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb faced the French along the Maginot Line.
Manstein was again his chief of staff and Blumentritt his chief of operations, although Manstein soon departed to command an infantry corps and was replaced by General Georg von Sodenstern.
Rundstedt's main field commanders (from north to south) were Blaskowitz (9th Army), List (12th Army) and General Ernst Busch (16th Army).
Hitler's original plan was to attack in late November, before the French and British had time fully to deploy along their front.
The plan, devised by Hitler, was essentially for a re-run of the invasion of 1914, with the main assault to come in the north, through Belgium and the Netherlands, then wheeling south to capture Paris, leaving the French Army anchored on the Maginot Line.
Most senior officers were opposed to both the timing and the plan.
Rundstedt, Manstein, Reichenau (commanding 6th Army in Army Group B), List and Brauchitsch remonstrated with Hitler in a series of meetings in October and November.
They were opposed to an offensive so close to the onset of winter, and they were opposed to launching the main attack through Belgium, where the many rivers and canals would hamper armoured operations.
Manstein in particular, supported by Rundstedt, argued for an armoured assault by Army Group A, across the Ardennes to the sea, cutting the British and French off in Belgium.
This "Manstein Plan" was the genesis of the blitzkrieg of May 1940.
A combination of bad weather, the arguments of his generals, and a breach of security when the details of the original plan fell into Allied hands, eventually led Hitler to agree to postpone the attack until early 1940, when it was again delayed by the invasion of Denmark and Norway.
In February, Hitler finally accepted the Manstein Plan.
General Günther von Kluge's 4th Army and General Maximilian Reichsfreiherr von Weichs's 2nd Army were transferred from Army Group B to Rundstedt's command.
General Ewald von Kleist was now to command Panzer (Armoured) Group Kleist, consisting of three armoured corps, led by Heinz Guderian, Georg-Hans Reinhardt and Hermann Hoth.
These armoured corps were to be the spearhead of the German thrust into France.
Although Manstein is often credited for the change of plans, he himself acknowledged Rundstedt's decisive role.
"I would stress that my commander, Colonel-General von Rundstedt, agreed with my view throughout, and backed our recommendations to the full.
Without his sanction we could never have kept up our attempts to change OKW's mind.
"During this hiatus, the group of senior officers who were plotting against Hitler's war plans, led by Halder, renewed their efforts, convinced that an attack in the west would lead to a war which Germany would lose.
Brauchitsch agreed with Halder's fears, but continued to vacillate about opposing Hitler – he asked Reichenau and Rundstedt to remonstrate with Hitler, but they refused.
Witzleben suggested that Rundstedt, Leeb and Bock should jointly refuse to carry out Hitler's orders to carry out the attack.
Two of the conspirators, Abwehr officers Hans Oster and Hans Bernd Gisevius, discussed this with Leeb, who turned them down but did not report them.
On 13 March, Himmler came to Koblenz to give the generals, including Rundstedt, an ideological lecture, in the course of which he made it clear that the atrocities against civilians which some of them had witnessed in Poland had been carried out on his orders, and with the approval of Hitler.
"I do nothing that the Führer does not know," he said.
The attack was finally launched on 10 May.
By 14 May, Guderian and Hoth had crossed the Meuse and had broken open the Allied front.
As planned, the British and French had advanced into Belgium to meet Bock's offensive, and were in danger of being cut off there by a German thrust to the sea.
Both Hitler and Rundstedt had doubts about the safety of allowing the armoured corps to get too far ahead of their infantry support, however.
Hitler sent the chief of staff of the Armed Forces Supreme Command ("Oberkommando der Wehrmacht", OKW), General Wilhelm Keitel, to Rundstedt's headquarters, to urge caution.
In Halder's words, Hitler was "frightened by his own success... afraid to take any chance."
Guderian objected vehemently to being ordered to halt, and Rundstedt was forced to mediate between Hitler and his impetuous armoured commanders, who were backed by Halder.
By 20 May, Guderian's tanks had reached the sea at Abbeville and closed the trap on the British and French, who were already in retreat to the English Channel ports.
By this time, however, Kleist's armoured forces were thinly stretched and had suffered losses of up to 50% of their tanks.
Kleist asked Rundstedt for a pause while the armoured units recovered and the infantry caught up, and Rundstedt agreed to this.
At the same time, Göring attempted to persuade Hitler that the Luftwaffe could destroy the trapped Allied armies, freeing the German forces to turn south towards Paris.
Hitler accepted this view, and on 24 May issued what became known as the Halt Order, preventing the German armour from rapidly capturing Calais and Dunkirk.
The Luftwaffe were unable to destroy the Allied armies, however, and the halt allowed the British Expeditionary Force and many French troops to be evacuated from Dunkirk.
This decision, for which Hitler, Rundstedt and Kleist shared responsibility, proved very costly to Germany's war effort in the long term.
After the war, Rundstedt described the Halt Order as "an incredible blunder" and assigned full blame to Hitler.
His biographer concedes that this "does not represent the whole truth", because the original impetus for a pause came from Kleist and Rundstedt himself.
Attention then turned to the attack on the French armies to the south.
On 29 May, Hitler came to Rundstedt's headquarters at Charleville-Mézières to discuss the new offensive.
Bock's Army Group B on the right was to advance on Paris, while Rundstedt's Army Group A, now consisting only of List's 12th Army, Weichs's 2nd Army and Busch's 16th Army, was to attack towards Soissons and Rheims.
Rundstedt's attack began on 9 June, and within a few days had broken the French resistance.
By 12 June, his forces were across the Marne and advancing south-east towards Alsace.
Dijon fell on 16 June and Lyon on 20 June.
By this time French resistance was crumbling and on 22 June the French requested an armistice.
In July, Hitler announced that Rundstedt and a number of other field commanders were to be promoted to the rank of Field Marshal ("Generalfeldmarschall") during the 1940 Field Marshal Ceremony.
Although Rundstedt wished to resume his retirement, he was persuaded by Hitler to stay in France and set up headquarters at Saint-Germain-en-Laye about outside Paris.
There he oversaw the planning for the proposed invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion, but never took the prospects for this operation seriously, and was not surprised when Hitler called it off in September after the Luftwaffe's setback in the Battle of Britain.
Even then, Rundstedt was not to be allowed to retire, when in October Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief West ("Oberbefehlshaber West", or OB West).