Rommel hit the world’s headlines as ‘The Desert Fox’ in 1941 when he and his Deutsches Afrikakorps ran rings around the British in the deserts of Libya. His renown grew in the following year when his Panzerarmee Afrika
threw the British back to El Alamein and nearly won the war in the desert, and then in 1943 when he smashed the Americans at Kasserine Pass.
His meteoric rise continued in 1944 when he commanded Heeresgruppe B defending Normandy against the Allied D-Day invasion. In just three years Rommel rose from being a colonel commanding a battalion to Germany’s youngest field marshal commanding an army, and two years later an army group.
Learn more about Rommel in Flames Of War here...
As a young man, no one would have predicted Erwin Rommel’s outstanding success. When Rommel built and flew
his own glider at the age of 15, he hoped for a career in aircraft design, but his father convinced him to join the army instead. So, in 1910, Rommel joined the 124th Württemberg Infantry Regiment as a cadet, gaining his commission as a Leutnant (and a fashionable monocle) two years later at the age of 18. When the First World War began in 1914, Rommel was as excited as his men at the thought of going into action.
