Perhaps the most famous and admired soldier to fight in World War
II was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who achieved immortality as the
Desert Fox. Rommel's first field command during the war was the 7th
Panzer Division-also known as the Ghost Division-which he led in
France in 1940. During this campaign, the 7th Panzer suffered more
casualties than any other division in the German Army. During the
process, it inflicted a disporoportionate amount of casualties upon
the enemy. It took 97,486 prisoners, captured 458 tanks and armored
vehicles, 277 field guns, 64 anti-tank guns and 4,000 to 5,000
trucks. It captured or destroyed hundreds of tons of other military
equipment, shot down 52 aircraft, destroyed 15 more aircraft on the
ground, and captured 12 additional planes. It destroyed the French
1st Armored Division and the 4th North African Division, punched
through the Maginot Line extension near sSivry, and checked the
largest Allied counteroffensive of the campaign at Arras. When
France surrendered, the Ghost Division was within 200 miles of the
Spanish border. No doubt about it-Rommel had proven himself a great
military leader who was capable of greater things. His next
command, in fact, would be the Afrika Korps, where the legend of
the Desert Fox was born. Rommel had a great deal of help in
France-and much more than his published papers suggest. His staff
officers and company, battalion and regimental commanders were an
extremely capable collection of military leaders, which included 12
future generals (two of them SS), and two colonels who briefly
commanded panzer divisions but never reached general rank. They
also included Colonel Erich von Unger, who would no doubt have
become a general had he not been killed in action while commanding
a motorized rifle brigade on the Eastern Front in 1941, as well as
Kark Hanke, a Nazi gauleiter who later succeeded Heinrich Himmler
as the last Reichsfuehrer-SS. No historian has ever recognized the
talented cast of characters who supported the Desert Fox in 1940.
No one has ever attempted to tell their stories. This book remedies
this deficiency. In the weeks prior to D-Day, Rommel analyzed
Allied bombing patterns and concluded that they were trying to make
Normandy a strategic island in order to isolate the battlefield.
Rommel also noticed that the Allies had mined the entire Channel
coast, while the naval approaches to Normandy were clear. Realizing
that Normandy would be the likely site of the invasion, he replaced
the poorly-equipped 716th Infantry Division with the
battle-hardened 352nd Infantry Division on the coastal sector. But
his request for additional troops was denied by Hitler. Mitcham
offers a remarkable theory of why Allied intelligence failed to
learn of this critical troop movement, and why they were not
prepared for the heavier resistance they met on Omaha Beach. He
uses a number of little-known primary sources which contradict
previously published accounts of Rommel, his officers, and the last
days of the Third Reich. These sources provide amazing insight into
the invasion of Normandy from the German point of view. They
include German personnel records, unpublished papers, and the
manuscripts of top German officers like general of Panzer Troops
Baron Leo Geys von Schweppenburg, the commander of Panzer Group
West. This book also contains a thorough examination of the
virtually ignored battles of the Luftwaffe in France in 1944.
General
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