Showing results for "Desert" in World War II

Penguin Presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Rommel? 'Gunner Who?' written and read by Spike Milligan. 'Keep talking, Milligan. I think I can get you out on Mental Grounds.''That's how I got in, sir.''Didn't we all.' The second volume of Spike Milligan's legendary...

This is the strange and fascinating life of Erwin Rommel, from his days as a youth in Imperial Germany - when he had a child out of wedlock with an early girlfriend - through his lauded military exploits during World War I to his death by suicide during World War II, after he attempted a failed coup against Hitler. Rommel was a man of contradictions: a soldier who wrote a best-selling book about World War I, a commander who went from commanding Hitler's bodyguard to trying to kill him, and a serious military mind who was known for participating in practical jokes.

Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s. When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Egypt when the desert war began. Here, he used his unique skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to 'hide' the Suez Canal from them. He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa. On Malta he developed 'the world's first portable holes': fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets.

John Olivey, an officer in the Long Range Desert Group, saw action in the Western Desert, where he was awarded the Military Cross; he fought in the Dodecanese, for which he was decorated a second time; and saw active service on mainland Greece, and in Istria. In autumn 1943, he was deployed to the Aegean and in October tasked with leading 'Olforce' in an ill-conceived operation to take the island of Levitha. Of some fifty LRDG, he was one of only seven to avoid capture. During the battle for Leros in November, he commanded X2 Patrol at Clidi, a key hilltop position. 

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures of World War II. Celebrated by some as a brilliant commander and chivalrous adversary, and condemned by others as a willing servant of the Nazi war machine, Rommel's legacy stands at the crossroads of myth and reality. But who was the man behind the legend of the "Desert Fox"?

World War II was an entirely different story. The Germans were angry after the First World War, and using public sway and anger, Adolf Hitler took power in the 1930s. Unlike the earlier army, the German Army of the Second World War committed some of the most grotesque and unforgivable atrocities in the history of mankind. This isn't to say that the German commanders and soldiers were all bad, and of all the men who fought for the Reich, the one with the most sterling reputation is Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. Rommel rose through the ranks of the German Army in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, and he proved to be a cunning and insinuative soldier who was one of the most brilliant cavalry commanders in the history of warfare. Eventually, the evil that surrounded him engulfed him, and his pure brilliance went untapped.

One of his biographers called him "a complex man: a born leader, a brilliant soldier, a devoted husband, a proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant." As that description suggests, every account of Erwin Rommel's life must address what appears to be its inherent contradictions.