Martli - what are your thoughts on Rommel?
Over all I'd say he's one of my favourites. I've read his book "Infantry Attacks" from his time in WWI and it's pretty cool: pretty detailed but somewhat understandable if you give yourself enough time to digest it. It's more or less his personal journey along with his insights in to tactics and so on. He's generally considered to be one of if not the best armoured warfare general in WWII: known for leading the "Ghost Division" in the French campaign (Named because no one could keep track of them) and let down in North Africa largely due to a severe lack of resources (a result of the war of attrition that was happening in Russia and Germany's rather poor production efforts). He was a bit of a gambler and liked to use big counter-offensive manoeuvres with tank formations and so on but was a quick thinker and easily adapted to the situations around him, whereas someone like Montgomery was more in to coming up with detailed plans and executing them to the very last detail. The Italians didn't like him very much because he generally used them as Cannon fodder in his offensive manoeuvres: fair enough if you ask me because the Italians started all the conflict in North Africa but didn't have the officer class to sustain any effective operations.
That being said I put a lot of his legacy down to hype from the Allies. They billed him as a worthy adversary type of character: a likeable opponent amongst a collection of inherently evil bad guys. The fact that he committed suicide after supposedly being involved in a plot to kill Hitler helps this immensely but whether he was
actually involved in any plot is unknown to anyone. He was really popular in Germany anyway, thought of as a loyal, professional solider who's job was simply to fight wars. He was apparently quite politically naive (apparently once suggesting to Hitler that he give a Jew a a position in the Nazi cabinet to try and quell suspicions that the Nazi regime was anti-Jewish) but again, the fact that he served in the first months of the war as the leader of Hitler's personal bodyguard, I very much doubt this.
Also interesting to note that he seemed to really rate Australian and New Zealand troops noting that "
If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it"
