Erwin Rommel

Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) was one of Germany's most prominent field marshals of World War II, celebrated by both his own troops and his Allied adversaries as the 'Desert Fox' for his mastery of mobile armored warfare in the North African campaign.

Infantry Prodigy and the 'Ghost Division'

Born in Heidenheim in southern Germany to a secondary school headmaster, Rommel had no aristocratic military pedigree but distinguished himself through frontline initiative during World War I. Fighting in France, Romania, and the Italian Alps, he captured Mount Matajur and thousands of Italian soldiers during the 1917 Battle of Caporetto, earning Imperial Germany's highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite. His 1937 tactical textbook, Infantry Attacks, became a bestseller and caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who appointed him commander of the Führer's headquarters guard and, in early 1940, commander of the 7th Panzer Division.

During the May 1940 invasion of France, Rommel led from the front in an armored command vehicle, improvising river crossings and slicing so deeply through French lines toward the English Channel that neither the French nor the German high command knew where his tanks were—earning the 7th Panzer Division the moniker the 'Ghost Division.'

The 'Desert Fox' in North Africa

In February 1941, after Benito Mussolini's Italian forces suffered catastrophic defeats against the British in North Africa, Hitler dispatched Rommel and the newly formed Deutsches Afrikakorps to Libya. Rather than standing on the defensive as ordered, Rommel immediately launched audacious flanking drives across the open desert. He mounted aircraft propellers on trucks to kick up dust clouds simulating tank columns and deployed high-velocity 88mm anti-aircraft guns horizontally to knock out heavily armored British tanks at long range.

When his forces captured the fortified port of Tobruk in June 1942, Rommel was promoted to Field Marshal at age fifty—the youngest in the German Army. Yet chronic fuel and ammunition shortages caused by Allied interdiction of Mediterranean supply convoys stalled his advance into Egypt, and in late 1942 British General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army decisively defeated Rommel's exhausted forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein.

Normandy Defense and Forced Suicide

Appointed to oversee coastal defenses along the English Channel in late 1943, Rommel worked feverishly to fortify the Atlantic Wall with millions of mines and beach obstacles. Convinced that Allied air supremacy would prevent German reserves from moving by day, he argued that panzer divisions had to be stationed directly behind the beaches to defeat the landings on the very first day. Overruled by Hitler, Rommel was unable to prevent Dwight D. Eisenhower's Allied forces from establishing a foothold in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Realizing that the war was lost and hoping to save Germany from total destruction, Rommel urged Hitler to seek a political settlement and became aware of officers conspiring against the regime. On July 17, 1944, a British Spitfire strafed his staff car in Normandy, leaving him with severe skull fractures. After the failed July 20 bomb plot against Hitler three days later, interrogations implicated Rommel. Fearing a public trial of Germany's most popular general, Hitler sent two generals to Rommel's home on October 14, 1944, offering him a choice between a treason trial that would doom his family and staff or suicide by cyanide with a state funeral and full pension for his wife and son. Rommel chose the cyanide capsule, dying at age fifty-two.