Word: rommels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Observers of the German collapse were also beginning to believe that there was no hard German line of defense to guard the roads to Paris. The U.S. tank columns found the propagandized Rommel Line thin and brittle: there seemed to be no fixed line of solid defenses west of the Maginot and Siegfried forts...
...thing Coningham learned in Africa was that an air force can be too air-minded. The Luftwaffe itself was ground-minded, completely controlled by Rommel, who tied it close to his artillery and tanks. On the other hand, Coningham's friendly and sometimes casual get-togethers with ground commanders were too loose. He went after closer integration (he dislikes the word "cooperation") with the ground forces, got it through Monty, with whom he ate, alongside whom he set up his quarters. It was Monty who uttered the doctrine: "We have one plan, one idea in mind. There...
...Rommel had a concentration of guns, armor and Italians at El Hamma. Coningham turned loose nearly every medium and light bomber in North Africa on the still-cocky Nazi. For two and a half hours, sticks of bombs were continuously in the air. At the end of the breakthrough and the pursuit, Rommel had lost 300 tanks and vehicles, and his armored back was finally broken...
Along with all the other bad news, Berlin admitted that it was more or less true about Field Marshal Rommel: he had indeed met with a deplorable accident while motoring in France during an Allied air raid. The Marshal, in fact, had had a brain concussion, though his condition was "satisfactory" his life "not endangered." But the mechanized Marshal was obviously in no shape to do much about the unseemly U.S. armored attacks rolling across France. Who had taken his place, Berlin...
...staff officers in Normandy last week heard reports they would have liked to believe: that Marshal Erwin Rommel was out of action. One report was that he had been seriously wounded, another that he was dead. Except for the end result, German prisoners' statements jibed with reports of French civilians: that Rommel's car had been strafed two weeks ago by an Allied pilot, that "The Fox" had been hit and further injured when his car overturned. The U.S. Army took the stories with a grain of salt, waited to hear more...