Product Review

Erwin Rommel was one of the greatest generals of World War Two.

But who was he before he became the Desert Fox?

Born in 1891, Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel did not come from a militaristic family, nor from the military stronghold of Prussia, but instead from a small town in southern Germany and son to a long line of schoolmasters.

Initially he showed no inclination towards a military career with interests in physics and engineering, but his father pushed him towards the army.

He joined the army in in 1910 at the age of eighteen, within one year he would rise to the rank of sergeant.

As war broke out in Europe Rommel and his regiment marched out of the barracks to the sound of drums and cheering as they boarded the troop train to the western front.

Gordon Corrigan provides expert analysis of World War One, both in terms of what it would have been like for a young officer like Rommel as well as the wider political and militaristic movements that were occurring at this time.

Thoroughly researched it gives fascinating detail on Rommel’s life, from when he was first shot and wounded in trench warfare, his experience of combat in the Romanian mountains and on the Italian front, through to his life after the war in the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic.

It was in these years that the Desert Fox learned his trade and forged into Rommel such a formidable opponent during the Second World War.

Praise for Gordon Corrigan:

‘Political, fluent, well-researched and extremely argumentative’ – Andrew Roberts.


'Meticulously researched and well-written' - Pennant

Major Gordon Corrigan is a retired Gurkha officer, a member of the British Commission for Military History and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fluent in the Nepali language, he is now a freelance military historian and battlefield lecturer. He is a well known figure on the History channel. He is also the author of Sepoys in the Trenches, Loos: 1915, Douglas Haig: Defeat Into Victory, General Pershing: Winning At All Costs and Wellington: A Military Life.