THE ROMMEL PAPERS (545 pp.)—Edlfed by. B. H. Liddell Harf—Harcourf, Brace ($6).
In the grim winter of 1942, while the Afrika Korps and the British Eighth Army were slugging it out in Cyrenaica, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said: "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general." Even before he died in 1944, Erwin Rommel had achieved legendary status among his Anglo-Saxon foes. By now he has a safe niche among those defeated military commanders—Lee and Napoleon are outstanding examples—who rise at least equal to their conquerors in the esteem of the military experts. Brigadier Desmond Young's biography, Rommel, the Desert Fox, sold 300,000 copies in Britain and the U.S., and the movie version, while raising the tempers of those who could not bear the sight of so high a pedestal for a Nazi general, helped make Rommel the best known enemy commander of the war.
The latest addition to the Rommel legend is a book written by Rommel himself. From the time he led his tanks across the French border in 1940, Rommel made copious notes on his exploits. From these, and from Rommel's letters to his wife, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, British military expert and historian, has put together a first-rate book, amply illustrated with Amateur Photographer Rommel's own shots. The Rommel Papers give the most revealing picture yet of a brilliant commander who lived, fought and died in the Prussian tradition of military ruthlessness.
To Erwin Rommel, the lives of his men and of himself were secondary to the larger matter of military objectives. So, naturally, were the lives of enemies. Rommel tells in his own words of coming upon a "particularly irate" French lieutenant colonel whose car was "jammed in the press" of surrendering French in 1940: "I asked him for his rank and appointment. His eyes glowed hate and impotent fury ... I decided, on second thought, to take him along . . . But he curtly refused to come with us, so, after summoning him three times to get in, there was nothing for it but to shoot him." Four years later, when Hitler bade Rommel poison himself, there was nothing for it but to swallow the poison.
More Than Intellect. Rommel regarded bravery, regularly demonstrated, as a necessary part of the equipment of a successful commander. A general, he wrote, should not fight his battle as a game of chess, but must take personal command in the field. His accounts of the fighting in France and North Africa are filled with such notes as: "To enable me to force the pace, I took the leading battalion under my personal command." This brought him constantly under enemy fire; he missed death by inches; his drivers and aides were killed; he suffered a fractured skull himself when strafing U.S. airmen caught his car in their gunsights in France.