Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

Description

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, in 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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer, 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 in the final reckoning fought only for his country, with no dark depths beyond.

Daniel Allen Butler is a veteran of the U.S. Army and the author of The Lusitania.

...an engaging human story. * Miniature Wargames - Chris Jarvis * Daniel's biography of Rommel is both educational and entertaining - I didn't know, for example, that he had had some kind of epiphany regarding the true nature of the Third Reich and its evil leader, Adolf Hitler. Fascinating stuff, a brilliant biography of a legend of the second world war. * Books Monthly * This book is a tour de force and easily one of the best that I have reviewed for Arrse. It also defines what a military biography should be - heaven help anyone else planning a biography of Rommel. 5 stars. * Army Rumour Service *