Title: Rommel The Desert Fox
Author: Desmond Young
Young, Desmond (1951). Rommel The Desert Fox. New York: Harper
LOC: 51009112
Date Posted: February 8, 2013
The best-known biography of Rommel in English, and still the standard work, is Desmond Young, Rommel, the Desert Fox (1950), a compassionate yet carefully researched work of a British brigadier general with considerable experience in desert warfare. It has been supplemented and updated by Ronald Lewin’s work, Rommel as Military Commander (1968), which concentrates almost entirely on Rommel’s most active years in the field, from 1940 to 1944. Paul Carell’s beautifully written, exciting, and meticulously researched account of the African campaign, The Foxes of the Desert (1960), was skillfully translated by Mervin Savill. See also Hans Speidel, Invasion of 1944: Rommel and the Normandy Campaign (1950), and Siegfried Westphal, The German Army in the West (1951).
I first read the Desert Fox as a cadet in ROTC and was very much impressed with Rommel’s genius, his incredibly bad luck, and his moral fiber. I have since seen documentaries on Rommel. I was unaware that he received attention by heading up Hitler’s bodyguard unit. Other than that, he might not have been promoted, and his genius for command never recognized.
Intelligence Fiction 