Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

Erwin Rommel was a complex man: a born leader brilliant soldier a devoted husband and proud father; intelligent instinctive brave compassionate vain egotistical and arrogant. In France in 1940 then for two years in North Africa then finally back in France again at Normandy in 1944 he proved himself a master of armored warfare running rings around a succession of Allied generals who never got his measure and could only resort to overwhelming numbers to bring about his defeat. And yet for all his military genius Rommel was also naive a man who could admire Adolf Hitler at the same time that he despised the Nazis dazzled by a Fhrer whose successes blinded him to the true nature of the Third Reich. Above all he was the quintessential German patriot who ultimately would refuse to abandon his moral compass so that on one pivotal day in June 1944 he came to understand that he had mistakenly served an evil man and evil cause. He would still fight for Germany even as he abandoned his oath of allegiance to the Fhrer when he came to realize that Hitler had morphed into nothing more than an agent of death and destruction. In the end Erwin Rommel was forced to die by his own hand not because as some would claim he had dabbled in a tyrannicidal conspiracy but because he had committed a far greater crime he dared to tell Adolf Hitler the truth. In Field Marshal historian Daniel Allen Butler not only describes the swirling innovative campaigns in which Rommel won his military reputation but assesses the temper of the man who finally fought only for his country and no dark depths beyond. Table of Contents AUTHORS NOTE PROLOGUE A Fox in the Desert 1 The Birth of a Soldier 2 The Great War 3 An Officer of the Reichswehr 4 The Third Reich 5 Blitzkrieg 6 Afrika Korps 7 Tobruk 8 Crusader 9 Der Hexenkessel 10 African Apogee 11 El Alamein 12 African Perigee 13 The Atlantic Wall 14 Invasion and Conspiracy 15 The Death of a Field Marshal EPILOGUE The Legend of the Desert Fox APPENDIX: RommelA Timeline ENDNOTES SOURCES