Armored Knight

ROMMEL, THE DESERT FOX (264 pp.) Desmond Young Harper ($3.50).

One of the few World War II battle commanders to become a legendary figure while the fight was still on was the Germans' stocky, colorful tank expert, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. At home he was idolized. In the field his Afrika Korps fought for him with matchless enthusiasm. Even sweeter to a professional soldier, perhaps, was the respect that he inspired in his enemies. Winston Churchill praised him in the House of Commons while Rommel was in the act of driving the British helter-skelter across North Africa. In the midst of the great North African campaign, General (now Field Marshal) Auchinleck acknowledged the Rommel legend in a general order to his troops: he warned them against believing that Rommel was a magician with supernatural powers.

Biographer Desmond Young, a wartime British brigadier, is too good a soldier to suppose that Rommel was a superman, but his admiration takes him just this side of hero worship. Brigadier Young was captured in North Africa by Rommel's men, had one brief glimpse of his hero, later escaped in time to serve with Auchinleck in India. After the war, Young went to Germany, talked with Rommel's widow, his son Manfred, his fellow officers and his orderly. When Rommel, the Desert Fox was published in England last year, it sold 170,000 copies to a chorus of professional applause. As one reviewer noted, Rommel seemed to be "the British army's favorite German general."

Crosses for the Captain. Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel, son of a Wuerttemberg schoolmaster, was a professional soldier and a good one from the start. At 20, he was graduated from the War Academy at Danzig and commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Two years later, in August 1914, he went into action in France. Says Biographer Young: "From the moment that he first came under fire he stood out as the perfect fighting animal, cold, cunning, ruthless, untiring, quick of decision, incredibly brave." Rommel emerged from World War I with only the rank of captain, but he sported a couple of Iron Crosses and the order Pour le Merite, which the Kaiser reserved generally for heroes, e.g., Air Ace Manfred von Richthofen and high-ranking generals. When the Treaty of Versailles cut the German army down to 100,000 men, Rommel was one of 4,000 officers picked to stay.

Young says that Rommel "admired and respected Hitler but had no use for Nazis," was never a Nazi himself and regretted that the Fuerhrer had surrounded himself with "scalawags." Yet it was Rommel who was assigned for awhile to improve the discipline of the Hitler Youth, who was later hand-picked by Hitler to command the Fuerhrer's personal bodyguard. Rommel's supposed enthusiasm for the Hitler program, says Young, was merely a piece of internal Nazi propaganda that irritated Rommel himself. In this, as in other conclusions, Author Young's biography naturally reflects his postwar sources among Rommel's family and well-wishers.

Rommel performed brilliantly in the desert, and Author Young explains the performance better than anyone else so far. When Montgomery finally bowled him over, in the assault beginning at El Alamein, it was by sheer weight and numbers. Of Montgomery, Rommel wrote: "He risked nothing which was the least dpubtful, and any bold action was completely foreign to him." To which Rommel's chief of staff, Fritz Bayerlein, added: "I do not think General Patton would have let us get away so easily."

Poison for the Hero. Young's picture of Rommel is that of a great commander and a simple, unsophisticated man who blindly followed his Fuehrer until, belatedly, he saw him taking Germany to ruin. Near the end, Rommel entered a plot to overthrow Hitler but, according to Young's sources, never joined in the July 1944 plot on Hitler's life. Rommel did buck his chief on the strategy for countering the invasion, and finally advised him to end the war.

Rommel's own time was almost up. On July 17, 1944, a strafing Allied fighter-bomber caught his staff car on a back road in Normandy and sent it spinning out of control. Physically tough, Rommel recovered from a triple fracture of the skull. But during the convalescence, Hitler had been tracking down everyone suspected of being in on the plot. He gave Rommel his choice of a trial or suicide. Rommel chose poison, and Hitler gave him a hero's funeral. The question Biographer Young never answers is how his shining hero could stomach the Nazi program as long as victory seemed possible, turned on Hitler only when defeat was certain.

Chivalry in war is a rapidly declining convention, but it dies hardest among what Ernest Bevin has called the "trade union of generals." Field Marshal Auchinleck, in a foreword to the book, salutes Rommel "as a soldier and a man" and deplores the passing of chivalry. Field Marshal Earl Wavell rates him "among the chosen few, among the very brave, the very true." And Biographer Young rather gratuitously remarks that he just can't help liking German generals. His Rommel is well-written, brisk, and touched with flashes of nice humor; in every other respect, it might have been written by a German general.

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