Fontana, 2012, 387p.

To anyone familiar with the film The Desert Fox, starring James Mason, the outlines of Rommel’s story will be familiar. The movie, though based on this book – the author even plays himself in the film – concentrates less on Rommel’s military career than his last days; with Rommel’s unwitting contacts with the July plotters leading to his forced suicide.

This biography, written after contact with Rommel’s family and first published in 1950, inevitably tends to be admiring. The author’s personal experience of Rommel’s conduct towards him as a PoW helps in this regard and there were no accusations of war crimes committed by the Afrika Korps. Winston Churchill himself regarded Rommel as a worthy opponent. Rommel’s anti-Nazi credentials are taken for granted by Young. (However recent reassessments in Germany have called this into question.)

In a military sense Rommel’s career speaks for itself. Though criticised as lacking in the strategic sense, his tactical ability, his capacity to see an opportunity and exploit it, to take risks even (especially?) when on the back foot paid off time and again. He had what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, “intuition in his fingers” and a sort of sixth sense for avoiding death.

Not a typical Prussian General (he was in fact a Württemberger and liked nothing better than talking to soldiers from the locality in the thick Swabian dialect) and not from a military family, in the Great War he won the Pour le Mérite for exploits on the Italian Front where he first displayed the qualities which made his troops so willing to follow him. He was in the forefront of the German breakthroughs in the defeat of France in 1940, but his commanders and colleagues thought him too reckless and/or selfish – and too willing to take credit for wider success. Part of this may, of course, have been professional jealousy. It was the Western Desert, with its wide open spaces, that allowed him to show himself as a master of motorised/armoured warfare. He recognised that such battles were more akin to sea warfare than land and he criticised the British for their more rigid approach while acknowledging that their training for more static warfare was excellent.

I had not realised before how nearly General Auchinleck‘s Operation Crusader came to defeating Rommel completely a year earlier than Alamein. That the British/Empire forces did so well considering their inferior equipment (poorer anti-tank guns, lower quality tanks – some Grants were available at this time but Shermans not until the next year) speaks volumes for their tenacity and endeavour. Rommell eventually turned the tables but his race to Egypt seriously overstretched both his army and his supply lines.

It was his contention that reinforcement could have resulted in him capturing Egypt and the Suez Canal. Once held at Alamein, and facing a well supplied and trained opponent with overwhelming superiority, he and his staff knew the jig was up.

He was bitterly aggrieved that, in the subsequent retreat and the aftermath of Operation Torch, reinforcements were then rushed in to Tunisia in what was by the time a lost cause.

After his first inspections of it he also knew that the much vaunted Atlantic Wall was anything but impregnable yet nevertheless – even through his disillusionment with Hitler and the upper General Staff (he had inspired the enmity of Kietel and Jodl in particular) – he threw himself into efforts to improve it.

British people who lived through the Second World War have a tendency to refer to the Italian army as a byword for uselessness (making jokes about tanks with only reverse gears for example.) It is noteworthy that Rommel himself had a greater appreciation of their qualities. “The Italian soldier was willing, unselfish and a good comrade and, considering his circumstances, his achievement was far above the average.” He goes on to add that their army’s performance exceeded anything the Italian Army had done for over 100 years. He attributes any failure to their military and state system, their poor equipment and lack of interest from Italian politicians.

Greenhill Books, 1994, 264 (+ xiv) p

Despite its title this book is not about the German aeroplanes of the First World War but rather the pilots who flew them. When originally published in 1931 it was the first book in English to deal with the German airmen of the time. Many of those names were familiar to me from other books on the war in the air (Quentin Reynolds’s They Fought For The Sky, Alexander McKee’s The Friendless Sky) but these mainly dealt with the Western Front. Here, as well as names such as Max Immelman, Oswald Boelcke, the Richthofen brothers, Werner Voss, Ernst Udet and Herman Göring, coverage is also given to other war theatres: Gunther Plüchow’s exploits in the far East, flying out of Tsingtao till it fell to the Japanese, Leutnant v Eschwege – dubbed “The Eagle of the Ægean Sea” by his Bulgarian Allies – whose base was Drama in Macedonia, “odd jobs” on the Eastern Front blowing up Russian supply railway lines, and in the Sinai doing the same to railways and aqueducts. These latter adventures at times read almost like Biggles stories, though not fiction and told from the opposite side.

The book is prefaced by an introduction (from 1994) by Norman Franks giving some historical context and two lists; pilots who achieved a “score” of 30 or more and all who were awarded the “Pour le Mérite” (“the Blue Max.”) It also has an odd typographical quirk where every semi-colon is preceded by a space ; as here. Was this a 1930s standard?

Since 1931 some of the incidents have been illuminated by more recent research. For instance, the famous “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, is now thought to have been killed by a bullet fired by an infantryman rather than Captain Roy Brown.

‘Vigilant’ (Claud W Sykes) when dealing with the Western Front has an irritating habit of referring to “English” aeroplanes or pilots when “British” would be more accurate but this is probably the term the Germans used and he is telling the tales from the German viewpoint. He is clearly much taken with the valour and chivalry of fliers on both sides and takes pains to point out that the German air force kept flying and fighting up to the armistice but the last sentence of his final paragraph, â”Im Kreig geboren, im Kreig gestorben.* Germany has no flying Corps and we all look forward to the day when no country will need one. But a few months before we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the armistice, two Germans, setting forth from a Dominion of the British Empire, flew the Atlantic from east to west. The third member of the crew was a British subject. Germany has still a future in the air!” reads somewhat chillingly now.

*Born in the war, died in the war. This refers to the fact that the German Flying Corps did not exist as such before the war and was forced by the armistice to hand over its aeroplanes and so did not outlive it.