Rommel And The Rebel

In 1937 five officers of the German High Command came to the United States to study Confederate campaigns of the Civil War and visit the sites of battles. When Lawrence Wells came across an old newspaper clipping detailing the event, his curiosity triggered a spark: What if one of the German officers had been “The Desert Fox” himself, future Field Marshal Erwin Rommel? The story begins in New York, where Colonel Rommel and his compatriots are overwhelmed by the city’s sights and smells. Exhilarated by a “strange sensation of freedom” Rommel watches a New York Giants baseball game and attempts to make sense of it, tours Gettysburg and Washington, D.C., and travels to Mississippi where, escorted by his interpreter, U.S. Army Lieutenant Max Speigner--and a bourbon-sipping William Faulkner--he roams Civil War battlefields and studies the cavalry tactics of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Four years later, with the Allied campaign going badly in North Africa, Speigner is dispatched to Egypt as an authority on Rommel. Aware of the influences Forrest’s techniques have had on the Desert Fox, Speigner embarks on an ironic attempt to predict, and outwit, Rommel’s own maneuvers. In a climactic encounter the pair are fatefully reunited on the battlefield, where for one breathtaking moment the power to change the course of history rests in the young American’s hands.
· “Mr. Wells knows his Civil War history, and his ability to breathe life, texture and, more important, dimension into the reconstruction of the clash of arms makes this a unique and genuinely rewarding book…” (Washington Times Magazine)
· “Explosive…adventure on a grand scale.” (Booklist)