Killing Rommel: A Novel of War by Stephen Pressfield

Killing Rommel, a novel written by Stephen Pressfield, is a fictional memoir of a World War II British officer named Chapman who serves in the North Africa Campaign. It is also an awesome story of men at war.

In Killing Rommel, the reader follows the fictional Chapman through his early life at a British public school, Oxford, the incredible seesaw fight in North Africa between the British 8^th Army and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, and then an ultimately doomed raid with the famous Long Range Desert Task Force to assassinate the German commander who was called, deservedly, the Desert Fox. Along the way the reader gets a feeling for what it was like to participate in one of the oddest campaigns in military history, atypical to most wars of the 20^th Century, certainly on World War II.

The North Africa Campaign was fought across trackless deserts stretching thousands of miles, broken only by the occasional escarpment, village, or oasis. In some ways North Africa was more like a fight at sea than on land, with formations of tanks and vehicles maneuvering across an ocean of sand to achieve just the right position to come to grips.

Conditions were as terrible as any place on Earth. Rommel himself called North Africa a "tactician's paradise, but a quartermaster's hell." The ability to get food, fuel, water, and ammunition to units across inhospitable country was as much a factor in victory or defeat as fire power or mass of men and vehicles. Brilliant offensives, that could gobble up hundreds of miles of conquered territory, could peter out just short of ultimate victory because of lack of supplies.

There was one other thing about North Africa, almost unique of any war fought in recent memory. That thing was the decency and something akin to chivalry with which it was fought. Prisoners on both sides were treated with respect, getting the same rations and medical care as the soldiers keeping them captive.

Behavior on the battlefield was like something from a medieval tale. One moment men could be trying their best to kill one another, The next moment they could call a truce so that the wounded could be evacuated in safety.

Compare that to the atrocities being committed on the Russian front.

The reason for this behavior rested in the hands on the German commander, Erwin Rommel, a man known for his sense of personal honor as much as for his tactical brilliance. Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party and his personal code was informed by a Prussian officer's sense of honor and even chivalry. It was one of history's bitterest ironies that Rommel fought on the side of history's worse monsters, something that he must have finally appreciated when he turned against that monster at the cost of his own life.

Chapman, a tank commander, is attached to the Long Range Desert Task Force in a mission designed to kill that man of honor and brilliance. But first they have to find their target, a story that occupies most of the last third of the novel. What follows is an epic of men at war, it's horror and glory, as compelling as anything Stephen Pressfield has written before, in his novels set in Ancient Greece.