Word: rommels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Young says that Rommel "admired and respected Hitler but had no use for Nazis," was never a Nazi himself and regretted that the Fürhrer 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 Fürhrer'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...
...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 Führer 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...
...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...
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...