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Rommel's Desert War: Waging World War II in North Africa, 1941-1943. By Martin Kitchen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-50971-8. Map. Idustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvii, 598. $38.00.
For more than 60 years codective memories and the imagery of the campaign in the Western Desert during World War II have been dominated by the larger-than-Ufe figure of Erwin Rommel. The 'Desert Fox' has drawn the attention, inspired the awe, and captured the imagination of English-speaking historians and popular authors aUke for decades. Bulging Ubrary shelves and second-hand bookstores are a weighty testament to a powerful tradition of adulation for the operational briUiance of a German officer (never a Nazi) who, according to popular consensus, ran rings around a succession of bumbUng British brass hats- until Monty arrived of course and at last and set the 8th Army on its proper course. That this narrative is basically nonsense, that for ad his skid Rommel was not an infalUbIe master of desert warfare- or that he in fact lost the campaign- never seems to have had much historiographical impact. Martin Kitchen's Rommel's Desert War, is in this regard a timely and important contribution to setting the record straight. It is not the only work of recent years that has sought to reduce Rommel's status to that of a mere mortal, and to subject his decisions and actions to analytical...