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Title: Killing Rommel: A Novel
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Manufacturer: Doubleday
List Price: $24.95
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| Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday Far from the author's best | I've read most, if not all the historical novels that Steven Pressfield has put out, with "Gates of Fire" being my favorite. Perhaps the fact that I am a 'military historian' and study the Second World War makes me more critical of this book, but to be honest I study the Eastern Front and the North African theater is as distant to me as the Spartans in "Gates of Fire." The theme of the book has been described well enough by other reviewers; I'd just like to give my impressions and why I think it a 3 star book, instead of the 5 stars most seem to give it.
To start off, I think I developed a better relationship with the desert than any of the characters featured here. There are a few scenes that I enjoyed but none compare to any of those in Pressfield's other historical novels. Whereas usually one would have a clear and decisive goal, the Long Range Desert Group has their plans changed on almost a chapter by chapter basis. Granted, this is war and with fog of war this is what happens, but in the end this read more like a written report to a higher up than a novel. I always appreciate authenticity and have never been let down by this author but I am quite annoyed at the praise heaped onto Rommel. He was hardly the best the Germans had, if he was he would have been on the Eastern Front where the outcome of the war was being decided, instead of stuck in North Africa fixing Mussolini's mistakes. He was a good divisional commander, but he couldn't command a corps or an army as evidence by the fact that he could not comprehend logistics and was soundly beaten when he faced an opponent of worth. His achievements in France were made against standing orders and his division performed no better than any other, if you disagree just find one division that didn't do a 'great' job in that campaign. It seems British propaganda about Rommel's achievements are more than evident within the pages of this work. Afterall, why would the British want anyone to believe that they were beaten by someone who wasn't as great as Rommel is made out to be? While I could deal with it if it was only brought up once or twice, that isn't the case here. Again and again I have to be reminded of how great of a commander he is, how brilliant, ad nauseum.
Perhaps I expected too much. I'm sure the majority will enjoy this book, but I'd rather read his other novels.
| | Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday A thoroughly engaging book --- and not just for military history buffs | General Erwin Rommel was probably the most famous German Field Marshal of World War II and was commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps. He became known by the nickname "The Desert Fox" for his skillful military campaigns waged on behalf of the German Army in North Africa that featured some of the finest strategies of World War II. His legacy also includes a reputation as being a chivalrous and humane military officer in contrast to many other figures of Nazi Germany.
It is the character Erwin Rommel that is the driving force behind KILLING ROMMEL. Steven Pressfield's career has been dominated by bestselling works of historical fiction, most famously with GATES OF FIRE (which has been optioned by George Clooney for a film treatment) about the Spartans' battle with the Persian army. He also wrote the non-military novel THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE, which was made into the Robert Redford movie starring Matt Damon and Will Smith.
KILLING ROMMEL is told from the perspective of R. Lawrence Chapman, and the story that proceeds from a brief introductory chapter allegedly comes from Chapman's diaries of his experiences with the British Army during World War II. Chapman is not a traditional military type and, in this story, went on to become a famous publisher following the end of WWII. Pressfield does a nice job of blending fact with fiction and features real-life British Army heroes like Jake Easonsmith, Paddy Mayne, Nick Wilder and Ron Tinker. Others represent composites or fictional characterizations.
Chapman is selected to join a secret unit known as the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), and they are identified by their scorpion insignia. The LRDG is tasked with infiltrating the German troops in North Africa and killing their leader, General Rommel. They recognize that this may indeed be a suicide mission but one that is necessary to alter the outcome of the war. General Rommel had just routed the British forces in a series of battles in the Western African Desert and is in the process of marching on to the gates of Alexandria. If the German troops are successful in this course, they threaten to push from the Suez into the Middle East oilfields. With Arab oil in their control, Hitler's army could very well break the backs of the European Allied Forces and Russian Army.
What follows during Chapman's recounting of his time with the LRDG is some very engaging historical and fictional accounts of the challenges and struggles that this secret unit faces against not only the Nazi Army but also the conditions of the African desert and their own vehicular limitations. It is during this point that you will forget you are reading a work of fiction and actually feel like you are there with this desperate British unit, as they valiantly struggle to overcome many obstacles in an effort to reach their goal of killing General Rommel.
With the British Eighth Army, led by General Bernard Montgomery, surging and a push from the recently landed American Allied Army led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the LRDG realizes how critical it is for them to succeed and provide intelligence that will allow their overall forces to succeed in stopping the Nazi desert push. The historical battle at El Alamein is an important turning point in this effort, and Pressfield again puts the reader right there with the LRDG. The eventual face-to-face confrontation between Chapman's team and General Rommel himself is powerful and contains enough nervous tension to make the best military history buff forget the eventual documented outcome.
It is a known fact that Rommel was defeated in his efforts to drive through to the Middle East, and this failure led to his eventual falling out with Hitler himself. Rommel's life ended with his suicide when he was fingered as part of a Nazi mutiny that plotted to kill Hitler. Pressfield succeeds greatly in making you feel distinctly what these young British soldiers went through during this North African campaign (which actually lasted from 1940-1943), and knowing the outcome of the battle ahead of time makes this novel no less interesting a read.
KILLING ROMMEL is a thoroughly engaging book --- and not just for military history buffs.
--- Reviewed by Ray Palen | | Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday Historical fiction at its very best | My copy of "Killing Rommel" arrived in the mail on Friday. By the time I closed the covers for the first time (I will open them again more than once, I'm sure) on Saturday, I had a blistering sunburn - and I'd hardly left the house. That is how intensely and intimately Pressfield drew me into the story, and into the sands of North Africa. It is Pressfield's genius to take us to a place we thought we knew from history classes (the battle of Thermopylae, the conquests of Alexander, the campaigns across North Africa) and make them come alive - to make it feel not only that we KNOW about the campaign, but that we REMEMBER the campaign.
Not only does Pressfield tell a crackling-good barn-burner of a story, he writes with an obvious mastery of the craft. Pick up "Killing Rommel" and open it to a random page. Read a sentence - any sentence. That sentence will be a work of art, because virtually every sentence is a work of art. You don't notice it unless you stop and look, because Pressfield has woven all of these carefully crafted passages so seamlessly into the story.
As in several of his previous novels, Pressfield (perhaps emulating the Desert Fox himself) draws you deep into the sands of the book and, when you're in far too deep to withdraw, has you step on a landmine. In this book, so full of the warrior ethos and the band of brothers camaraderie of barracks and battlefields, the landmine for me was the single paragraph in which Chapman reflected upon "the perverse logic of war and the true tragedy of armed conflict."
Whether you are a history buff, a veteran or fan of all things military, or just want to pick up the sort of novel that grabs you by the nose and kicks you in the rear, you'll love "Killing Rommel." Just don't start reading it on Sunday evening if you have to go to work on Monday.
| | Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday A perfect rose in the field of battle | I can add little more to the eloquent 5-star praise and synopses thus far for Pressfield's newest wartime adventure, except "Ditto for me and roger all that." I've immensely enjoyed and been edified by every book this master storyteller has written.
I can count on his typically thorough research to inform me accurately on the factual details as well as the grand historical dramas in which his subjects play their parts. For his narrative technique, which looks out from inside the soldier's mind, I award him the title of "soldier's chronicler," in the dirt with the boys where Gen. Omar Bradley liked to be. At the same time, the action scenes, the slash-burn-grit-grind of battle, are more reminiscent of Patton. It's an unbeatable combination to have telling a war story.
Pressfield pulls us into the fray and helps us feel what it's like to be right there in the muck, agony and glory of it all. The feeling sticks with you, the taste stays in your mouth, and it changes you a bit. To me a book is like a conversation and, having journeyed around the block many times, I get rather picky when it comes to who gets my attention and for how long. Keeping these world-wizened eyes stayed on a story requires a very special talent which this author has in abundance.
As for Rommel himself, possibly the last of the honorable gentlemen warriors, this book inspired a nice epiphany. We know the story of Hitler's ultimatum to Rommel and the general's resulting suicide. But it was with a new sense of irony I realized more fully, after reading this account of the Brits' determined plotting and planning to take out the Desert Fox, that his own boss was the only one who could finally do him in. I take this as Pressfield's tribute to a remarkable general that gives the book's title another, more subtle dimension I hadn't imagined. | | Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday The Horror and Glory of War in North Africa | 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 8th 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 20th Century, certainly on World War II.
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. | | Killing Rommel: A Novel by Doubleday Product Description | ***
To watch videos featuring the story behind Killing Rommel, visit www.KillingRommel.com
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Steven Pressfield’s quintet of acclaimed, bestselling novels of ancient warfare— Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Last of the Amazons, The Virtues of Wa,r and The Afghan Campaign— have earned him a reputation as a master chronicler of military history, a supremely literate and engaging storyteller, and an author with acute insight into the minds of men in battle. In Killing Rommel Pressfield extends his talents to the modern world with a WWII tale based on the real-life exploits of the Long Range Desert Group, an elite British special forces unit that took on the German Afrika Korps and its legendary commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, "the Desert Fox."
Autumn 1942. Hitler’s legions have swept across Europe; France has fallen; Churchill and the English are isolated on their island. In North Africa, Rommel and his Panzers have routed the British Eighth Army and stand poised to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oilfields of the Middle East. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the British hatch a desperate plan—send a small, highly mobile, and heavily armed force behind German lines to strike the blow that will stop the Afrika Korps in its tracks. Narrated from the point of view of a young lieutenant, Killing Rommel brings to life the flair, agility, and daring of this extraordinary secret unit, the Long Range Desert Group. Stealthy and lethal as the scorpion that serves as their insignia, they live by their motto: Non Vi Sed Arte—Not by Strength, by Guile as they gather intelligence, set up ambushes, and execute raids. Killing Rommel chronicles the tactics, weaponry, and specialized skills needed for combat, under extreme desert conditions. And it captures the camaraderie of this “band of brothers” as they perform the acts of courage and cunning crucial to the Allies’ victory in North Africa.
As in all of his previous novels, Pressfield powerfully renders the drama and intensity of warfare, the bonds of men in close combat, and the surprising human emotions and frailties that come into play on the battlefield. A vivid and authoritative depiction of the desert war, Killing Rommel brilliantly dramatizes an aspect of World War II that hasn’t been in the limelight since Patton. Combining scrupulous historical detail and accuracy with remarkable narrative momentum, this galvanizing novel heralds Pressfield’s gift for bringing more recent history to life. |
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