Get Rommel: The Secret British Mission to Kill Hitler's Greatest General [Paperback]

Michael Asher is a former SAS soldier who has attained a reputation as a good writer on military and allied subjects. His other reputation is as a maverick unwilling to toe the compromise line. For him, truth is all-important, it seems and he has stuck out his neck in various books and TV documentaries, among them one on the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher and another about "Andy McNab's" story of what happened to his patrol in Iraq (Asher's book is The Real Bravo Two Zero...). An iconoclast.

In this book, the story of the attempts to kill or (less likely) kidnap Rommel is told. In the first try, Lt. Ravenscroft was captured and others of the raiding party killed. Ravenscroft survived the war to become a Daily Mirror journalist and (using that flexibility with the factual truth to good advantage) wrote a fascinating but not wholly accurate series of books on the Third Reich, Templars and the Occult, the first being the famous Spear of Destiny. These latter facts are not in this book.

The second attempt to kill Rommel ended with the commander of the raiding party getting a posthumous V.C. I was reminded of the words of the Jack Hawkins character in the 1960 British film The League of Gentlemen: "I've nothing against heroes...it's just that they tend to crook it for other people"...! Asher shows clearly that many of the British officers of the period were, basically, duffers, which particularly applied to the misfits who founded and served in the early "irregular warfare" units like Layforce and the early SAS. He does not leave out Stirling, whom I always suspected (despite his sainted status within the SAS) was a bit of an idiot. I always wondered why he never got beyond Lt. Colonel.

Asher shows that Stirling was a rich, well-connected young idler, called by his own fellow-officers The Great Sloth, unable to perform his duties properly in his original job, but who blossomed (like Lawrence of Arabia?) when given his head and freedom. He would probably, today, be diagnosed as at least borderline psychopath, as would Paddy Mayne, another SAS hero.

Asher shows though that Stirling was lucky in having an "in" socially and to the right family connections. The same was true of many early "irregulars", like Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill and Keyes, the commander of the second Rommel raiding party. Asher shows that Keyes was almost certainly killed in "friendly fire" by his own men. The German defenders were taken by surprise and fired only one shot. One of the worst soldiers shown was supposedly a fastrack military meteor, one Laycock, whom Asher shows convincingly to have been incompetent, stupid, a coward who abandoned his own men in Crete, someone unfitted for command. Despite the foregoing, Laycock was promoted Major-General at 36 years of age and died full of honours in about 1960, after having become, inter alia, Governor of Malta! As so often, someone probably promoted to the level of his own incompetence.

As for Rommel, he was not even there at the time of the raid, meaning at his HQ on the coast of Libya, but was in Europe! This was a fact known to British Intelligence at a higher level, but not passed down to the active or tactical level.

A very interesting book. I always thought that that raid had been at another villa used by Rommel, at Hammamet in Tunisia (now a museum), so I learned something new. The book is also useful as a debunking of some of the subsisting myths of WW2, the myth of always clever and brave officers, who would never get things muddled or (as the commanders did in Crete) simply abandon their men to be killed or captured, while they escaped...

I was interested to see how certain characteristics of the early version of the SAS (drinking rum and tea in the desert, people binned from being selected because the face does not fit, a certain preference given to ex-Guards personnel --the SAS has a squadron, G Squadron, entirely composed of them) still have relevance, or so we are told, today, in a Special Air Service which has, in reality, very little in common with that semi-amateur band of brothers set up by Stirling in the Western Desert long ago..

Good.

Bought this for my husband and he hasn't been able to put it down. A thoroughly good, informative realistic read