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Historical person
1891–1944
Erwin Rommel was a German army officer who gained fame in the First World War and commanded armoured forces in France and North Africa during the Second. As leader of the Afrika Korps he developed a reputation for mobile warfare and personal boldness, though the campaign also depended on Axis occupation and supply systems. In 1944 he commanded defences in France. Implicated indirectly in the July plot against Hitler, he was forced to take poison to protect his family.
Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca places Rommel’s North African campaign within a fictional espionage plot, and he appears in many war novels about the desert and D-Day. Fiction has often repeated the image of the apolitical “good German,” partly created by wartime propaganda and post-war memory. More recent treatments examine his service to the Nazi state alongside his later disillusionment and contacts with conspirators.
In non-fiction, Erwin Rommel is discussed in Damien Lewis’s SAS Ghost Patrol, James Holland’s The War in the West: A New History, Volume 1, Damien Lewis’s SAS Brothers in Arms, and John Man’s The D-Day Atlas. In Damien Lewis’s SAS Ghost Patrol, the account shows how the Long Range Desert Group and early SAS combined navigation, deception and endurance against forces commanded by Erwin Rommel.
Historical context
Series
Rifleman follows John Sharratt from wartime loss and conscription into the British Army during the Second World War. The sequence moves from the Blitz and training into the North African desert, where ordinary infantry experience the pressure of modern war, retreat, endurance and battle against Rommel’s forces.
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Combined Operations follows Tom Harsker and a commando unit through the Second World War and into Korea. The series begins with Britain under pressure in 1940 and moves through raids, occupied Europe, Dieppe, Sicily, D-Day, the Scheldt and the final advance into Germany before shifting to the Korean…
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The Jack Tanner series follows a sergeant in the fictional King’s Own Yorkshire Rangers through the British Army’s changing fortunes between 1940 and 1943. The Odin Mission begins during the retreat from Norway, Darkest Hour moves through the fall of France and Dunkirk, and Blood of Honour places…
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The After Dunkirk series follows the Littlefield family from the evacuation of 1940 through the final campaigns of the Second World War. Separated across occupied France, Britain, North Africa, Italy, Germany and the Pacific, the siblings serve as pilots, soldiers, intelligence officers, codebreakers and resistance operatives while their…
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The Breaking Point series follows RAF fighter pilot Johnnie Shaux and mathematician-turned-military analyst Eleanor Rand, later Eleanor Shaux, through the successive years of the Second World War. Johnnie experiences the conflict from cockpits, airfields and operational units, while Eleanor works in headquarters where intelligence, logistics and strategy determine…
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The World War II series traces the principal American campaigns from North Africa in 1942 to the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The Rising Tide covers North Africa and Sicily; The Steel Wave reconstructs D-Day and Normandy; No Less Than Victory follows the Battle of the…
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The WWII Italian Collection groups three independent adventures connected with Italian forces, territories and the Mediterranean war. The books move from the invasion of British Somaliland to black-market survival in North Africa and the struggle to protect works of art in wartime Naples. The collection balances front-line action…
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Originally published under the Alan Savage name, the Sword Series links members of the Brand and Warrey families through the conflicts of the 1930s and the Second World War. Harry Brand begins as a medical orderly in Ethiopia, and later volumes follow the fall of Singapore and Burma,…
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The WWII Collection contains four standalone combat and espionage thrillers set in distinct theatres of the Second World War. The novels range from a desert commando raid and resistance warfare in occupied France to the hunt for stolen D-Day plans and the battle for Monte Cassino. Each book…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
