Erwin Rommel Archives

M-4 Sherman tanks of the 11th Armored Division await the call to advance near Eterville on June 30, 1944. Three weeks after Operation Overlord had begun, the fighting near Caen was bitter.

Erwin Rommel

Operation Jupiter: The Fight for the Key to Normandy

By Jon Latimer

The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, produced a bitter struggle for control of the invasion beachhead. Read more

Erwin Rommel

Grand Mufti al-Husseini: Britain’s Deadliest Enemy?

By Blaine Taylor

Like all Palestinians and most Arabs, Haj Amin al-Hussaini not only looked forward to an Axis Pact victory in World War II but also saw it as a means of defeating what he believed was a joint British-Jewish conspiracy to foist an Israelite homeland on the Middle East that would be to the detriment of his own people. Read more

Erwin Rommel

The Fieseler Storch Fi 156

by Blaine Taylor

On March 12, 1939, Heroes’ Memorial Day (or Veterans Day) in the Nazi Third Reich, the thousands of onlookers at the giant annual parade in Berlin were treated to an unusual sight as a small monoplane landed on the Unter den Linden between Hermann Göring’s State Opera House and the Neue Wache (New Guardshouse). Read more

Wehrmacht infantrymen march through a Belgian town to occupy territory overrun by armored divisions.

Erwin Rommel

German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris

by David Alan Johnson

In most popular spy thrillers, secret agents are tall, handsome, virile, and irresistible to women. Whether their name is Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan, or James Bond, all are hard-drinking, well-tailored ladies’ men. Read more

Erwin Rommel

Queen of the Desert: The Infantry ‘Matilda’ Tank

By Jon Diamond

The origins of the Matilda Tank or “I” Tank date back to 1934, when Maj. Gen. Percy C.S. Read more

Erwin Rommel

D-Day Battle for Easy Red & Fox Green Beaches

By Flint Whitlock

Forming the very tip of the Allied spearhead that thrust onto the heavily fortified Omaha beachhead at Normandy was the U.S. Read more

Free French and American troops, veterans of the fierce fighting in the border region of Alsace along the French frontier with Germany, are reviewed by General Charles de Gaulle on February 14, 1945.

Erwin Rommel

Free France Resurgent: Charles de Gaulle in World War II

By Glenn Barnett

On the evening of June 16, 1940, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was appointed Prime Minister of France. It was a critical time. Read more

Erwin Rommel

General Omar Bradley: Dwight D Eisenhower’s Indispensible Lieutenant

By Cole Kingseed

Great commanders need great subordinates. In the campaigns in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of World War II, General Dwight D. Read more

Erwin Rommel

The Largest Plot to Kill Hitler? – Operation Valkyrie

by Blaine Taylor

For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more

A column of German PzKpfw. III tanks rolls along a dirt road in North Africa. When American troops of the II Corps came up against the German veterans, the initial results were disastrous. The American commander, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, was also found unequal to the task of leading troops in combat.

Erwin Rommel

The Battle of Kasserine Pass and the Failure of General Lloyd Fredendall

By Jerome Baldwin

He came highly recommended, praised by General George C. Marshall as “one of the best.” But ultimately from these high hopes and expectations would come disastrous failure. Read more

Abandoned casemates of the Maginot Line stand as silent and futile sentinels in the wake of the victorious Wehrmacht.

Erwin Rommel

The French Maginot Line: Its Full History and Legacy after WWII

By Flint Whitlock

Like a disjointed, moss-covered, concrete serpent, the French Maginot Line snakes some 800 miles, from the Mediterranean border with Italy northward, until it disappears near the North Sea. Read more

Erwin Rommel

Operation Overlord’s Colonel Alexis von Roenne

By David Alan Johnson

During the early part of 1944, an event took place that would change the outcome of World War II. Read more

Erwin Rommel

Operation Crusader at Sidi Rezegh—Siege of Tobruk

By Thomas Haymes

By the end of the second day visibility was reduced to almost zero. Burning hulks of everything from ME-109s to M3 “Honey” tanks, Panzer IIIHs, and trucks of all descriptions littered the battleground that was once an airfield. Read more

Embattled Tobruk lies under a pall of smoke during Rommel’s push to capture the vital North African port city in the spring of 1941.

Erwin Rommel

The Siege of Tobruk: WWII’s Debacle in the Desert

by Michael D. Hull

Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Sollum, Sidi Rezegh, Mersa Matruh, Bir Hacheim, El Agheila, Beda Fomm, Sidi Omar, Benghazi … The names of many remote villages in North Africa were written into history in 1941-1942 as British and Axis armies battled back and forth across the scrubby desert wastelands of northern Egypt and Libya. Read more

Erwin Rommel

General Douglas MacArthur’s Navy

By Glenn Barnett

In November 1941, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet weighed anchor in Shanghai, China, for the last time. Alarmed by the growing hostility and aggressiveness of the Japanese, Admiral Thomas Hart ordered the outnumbered and outgunned American vessels moved to the relative safety of Manila Bay in the Philippines. Read more

Explosions rock Malta during an enemy air raid. Due to Malta’s location along German and Italian supply routes, its airfields and dockyards were subject to many bombing runs.

Erwin Rommel

The Siege of Malta in WWII: Holding on to the Island Fortress

By John Brown

When World War II began in September 1939, just nine months before the Siege of Malta, its three small islands in the central Mediterranean were still considered part of the British Commonwealth. Read more

Erwin Rommel

D-Day 1943: Could the Allied Invasion of Western Europe Have Happened One Year Earlier?

By Lt. Col. John Fenzel III

On June 6, 1944, the Allies unleashed on land, air, and sea the largest invasion force in world history in an enormous effort to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. Read more

Unknown to the British, Rommel made little use of his Libyan headquarters at Beda Littoria.

Erwin Rommel

Operation Flipper: British Commandos Take on General Erwin Rommel

By Joseph M. Horodyski

On the night of November 13, 1941, the British submarine Torbay, accompanied by the Talisman, broke the surface of the Mediterranean off the Cyrenaican coast of Libya and rolled violently in the running seas. Read more

Erwin Rommel

The Afrika Korps at El Alamein: Beginning of the End

By John Brown

Tobruk, the vital Libyan seaport on the coast of Cyrenaica, fell to General Erwin Rommel and his victorious Afrika Korps in less than 24 hours after an unexpected and devastating air, armor, and infantry attack on June 21, 1942. Read more

Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, poses with several of his men prior to their departure for a raid. The heavily armed Jeeps usually mounted twin Vickers machine guns and carried provisions for extended forays into the desert.

Erwin Rommel

Commando Paddy Mayne: Ireland’s Wolf of the Desert

By Kelly Bell

The night of December 14, 1941, was bitterly cold in the North African desert. Midway between El Agheila and Tripoli, Libya, was the German and Italian air base outside the town of Tamet. Read more

From Around the Network

Times change for Japan and Korea, but bitter memories linger.

A Horrible Harbinger: The Sino-Japanese War of 1894

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, or the Consolidated B-24 Liberator?

Garand’s Wonder Weapon