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Killing Rommel: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Steven Pressfield
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $9.99
You Save: $14.96 (60%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 7130
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0385519702
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385519700
ASIN: 0385519702
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
***
To watch videos featuring the story behind Killing Rommel, visit www.KillingRommel.com
***
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 terrible October 2, 2008
All I do is read. Too bad this book in unreadable. Try as I did I could never get past the strange method of telling the so-called story. It is so wierdly written.I finally just chucked it in the trash.
Fine Novel, Faulty History September 25, 2008
The least credible statement in this book is in the 'Historical Note'. In that the author claims: 'All details of the trucks and tanks are historically accurate as are desert geography and place names, campaigns of the war and timing of battles, equipment, weapons, nomenclature and all wireless and operational protocols'. Well, trucks, equipment, nomenclature, and protocols are one thing. As for tanks, the campaigns of the North African war and the timing of battles he makes manages an amazing series of bloopers.
He keeps referring to much experience by the British with long-barreled Mark IV panzer tanks before and during June 1942. The Panzerarmee Afrika had none of these prior to then and only four during the Tobruk battle.
He further credits German infantry in Africa in June 1942 with Panzerfausts (their bazookas); they had none until 1943. He identifies Australian infantry under 8th Army command near Halfaya Pass in June 1942; they were in Syria at the time and not under 8th Army until July at 1st Alamain. He has a New Zealander refer to his division as taking part in Operation Battleaxe in Spring 1941; they also were not there at that time but hundreds of miles further east.
He identifies Bren carriers as used mostly to 'transport infantry'; they were used to transport mortars, machine-guns, ammunition, and act as 'recce' vehicles and were not troop carriers as were post-war armored personnel carriers.
He has Bernard Montgomery as the 8th Army commander during 1st Alamain (July 1942); Auchinleck was then in command, Monty came a few weeks later for the Alam Halfa battle, which the author seems to confuse with 1st Alamain. Similarly, the author has crews in Egypt training in Sherman tanks during 1st Alamain (July 1942); this didn't happen until September, after Alam Halfa.
He has the 'recce' troop of his main character (Lt. Chapman) consisting of four tanks whereas British tank troops usually had only three. He claims this troop was assigned a mix of tanks, whereas British practice was to keep entire squadrons, let alone troops, of the same type, or at least of the same type gun. He has his fictional troop consisting not only of different tank types but different guns: Crusaders and A9/A10 cruisers with 40mm guns, Stuarts with 37mm guns, Italian M13s with 47mm guns, even heavy Grants (never assigned to 'recce' or 'light' troops) with 75mm guns. Such a mix of ammunition would not have been permitted. Moreover, if memory serves me well, "recce" troops within armored regiments at this time didn't have tanks at all, but two-man armored Dingo scout cars.
To cap it all off, in early 1943 when we finally meet Erwin Rommel, he is identified with the insignia and title of a General; whereas the whole world knows that months before he was made a Field Marshall ! That's in the James Mason movie.
Getting past all these mistakes, however, it must be conceded that 'Killing Rommel' is a fine war novel, capturing the spirit and experience of the British Empire's special forces in the desert in the twilight of that empire's history. Just don't take it as factual history.
 A truly extraordinary piece of military historical writing September 23, 2008
I'm an admirer of the author's five previous books dealing with war and military life in the ancient world -- but that's where my own academic background is and I understand what's happening perhaps better than most readers. I wasn't sure about this one, though, which is Pressfield's first historical set in our own time. For one thing, the technology and strategy of World War II is vastly different from those of the ancient world. But I needn't have been concerned. Pressfield has the rare knack of dropping strange terminology and unknown place names into the story, often without explanation, and still maintaining a crystal clear narrative. The setting is Libya and Tunisia in 1941 to 1943, the players are the members of the British Long Range Desert Group (the LRDG) and their German and Italian opponents. The plot revolves, at first, around an attempt to trap and kill the charismatic Erwin Rommel, arguably the most brilliant combat general on either side in the war -- but the plotline changes as the necessities of war themselves change. The narrator is Lt. Chapman, a twenty-year-old tank officer in Egypt who is seconded to the LRDG to report back to Eighth Army HQ on the "going" of several questionable routes through the desert. He shortly ends up in consensus command of Patrol T3 -- almost the only fictional part of the whole novel -- where he finds his true nature, rather to his own surprise. You might think this is rather a short novel -- it's less than 300 pages -- for such a sprawling subject as the three-year struggle for control of North Africa. But Pressfield never wastes so much as a paragraph. His style is never flowery but straightforward, unadorned storytelling. Every line goes into relating the story, even when he provides the protagonists' back-stories in the early chapters. And when the characters begin the "ride" around which most of the book revolves, the reader had better hang on tight because the action is unrelenting and builds continually, until near the end your knuckles will be white from gripping the book. And before you begin Chapter 23, make sure you're someplace where you won't be disturbed. Lock the door if you have to. You'll not want even to pause for breath for the duration of those pages. As Chapman himself notes, some of those with whom he serves, while not "professional" soldiers in any sense, were nevertheless warriors in the fullest sense of the word, and would have been quite at home in Alexander's armies. What's more, nearly all the heroes of the story -- Mayne, Wilder, Tinker, Easonsmith, "Popsky" -- were real people. I predict the readers of this extraordinarily deep-feeling book will be searching for additional reading about them and their feats.
Different in its way but still magnificent. September 10, 2008
The book was really different from what I thought it was going to be. It is seemingly a departure from Pressfield normal way of story telling. However, given enough time and reflection you can see how similar it really is. This is no "Gates of Fire" but it is a nice addition to my historical fiction library.
A good fictional account of the Long Range Desert Group August 11, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Killing Rommel is Mr. Pressfield's initial WWII historical fiction account. As with his earlier books, Mr. Pressfield takes a person the average reader can possibly relate to and puts him into extraordinary situations. In this case, Mr. Pressfield's main character (Chapman) is a British Lieutenant from an armored regiment who is embedded into a Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) unit. In addition to their normal job of scouting and raiding the Axis forces in North Africa, Lt Chapman's troop is focused on attempting to neutralize the Afrika Korps greatest asset, Rommel.
My Likes:
I'd like to open by saying that this book covers a subject that's largely ignored in many histories, the LRDG. While this is historical fiction, Mr. Pressfield has done an outstanding job of working with the LRDG historical societies to bring the story of the men who served in the LRDG. Mr. Pressfield describes the difficulties the LRDG had in crossing the North Africa sands to scout the Axis rear areas and to raid them. While there are a limited number of actions Mr. Pressfield describes, those that he does provide us are sharp, to the point, and almost as if Lt. Chapman were there telling us about it. The best example of this is when they're raiding an airfield and they're dealing with the confusion of fighting at night and not being sure where all of the enemy forces are.
Mr. Pressfield also does a very good job capturing the language of the era. This is probably best shown when Lt. Chapman is a tank commander and he's talking on the radio with his headquarters section. When reading the dialog I was convinced that Mr. Pressfield had read Brazen Chariots: An Account of Tank Warfare in the Western Desert, November-December 1941 by Robert Crisp and just reformatted it to fit his story. In his credits, Mr. Pressfield cites sources that might have given similar dialog to what Mr. Crisp had in his book.
Other likes include the supporting characters, particularly Collier and his steadfastness and how Mr. Pressfield captured the sense of honor between the Axis and the British in North Africa; it falls very close to what was described in War Without Hate: The Desert Campaign of 1940-43(a historical account of the war in North Africa).
My Dislikes:
My most basic complaint against this book is that Lt. Chapman wasn't fully convincing, particularly when away from combat. Lt. Chapman is to stiff and too formal when he doesn't need to be. There's also to much rebellion in his armored regiment while the regimental commander may not have performed as well as others, most British officers wouldn't disobey his orders directly.
Another problem Mr. Pressfield had were a few historical inaccuracies: The three worst ones were when he mentioned that the Afrika Korp had panzerfaust (they initially came out in late 1942 but were limited to the Russian Front and we're that effective), that British tanks didn't have HE (high explosive) rounds (the US supplied tanks did, meaning M-3 Stuarts and M-3 Grants), and the time line didn't seem to flow with the historical timeline. An officer detached to a unit as long as Lt. Chapman was would have been considered as no longer a part of the regiment.
The Rating:
I went into this book looking for it to meeting Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylaeand I'm sorry to say that it's not. I was in love with parts of this book and bored by others. This makes rating this one a little trickier than in the past. I'll call it 3.5 stars and round up to 4 only because of the uniqueness (dealing with the LRDG) and because of the intense descriptions when Lt. Chapman was in combat and with the LRDG. If it wasn't for those the rating would be 3 stars.
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