Triumphant Fox

A military historian examines the strategic cunning of Erwin Rommel’s first campaign in North Africa during WWII.

The legend of “The Desert Fox,” German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was forged in the North African desert conflicts of World War II. It was here, as commander of Germany’s Afrika Korps, that Rommel ignored orders from German High Command and launched his infamous West Desert campaign into Cyrenaica, now eastern Libya.

Driving his exhausted Panzer forces with his indomitable will, Rommel swept through North Africa, where he brought the British Eighth Army to the brink of defeat. Although ultimately curtailed by supply shortages and logistics problems, Rommel nearly claimed the entire region for Hitler.

In this stirring account of Rommel’s first campaign, Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. takes the reader into his subject's strategy, mindset and viewpoints.