Get Rommel: The Secret British Mission to Kill Hitler's Greatest General. Michael Asher

This title reveals how an early Commando operation in the Mediterranean ended in disaster in the desert. In summer 1941 Erwin Rommel was Hitler's favourite general: he had driven the British out of Libya and stood poised to invade Egypt. He seemed unbeatable. So the British decided to have him killed. The British opened their counter-attack with a series of special forces raids, both a Cammando raid on what was thought to be Rommel's headquarters and the first ever operation by the newly formed SAS. Rommel was one of the targets. Michael Asher reveals how poor planning and incompetence in high places led to disaster in the desert-- and how fantastic bravery and brilliant improvisation enabled a handful of men to escape. The reputation of Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, as Hitler's greatest General, struck awe into his Allied opponents in the Desert War. In order to establish the credentials of the newly-created Special Air Service as an effective unit, the SAS commander, David Stirling, proposed a daring raid to capture or kill the legendary German soldier. Approved by Stirling's peacetime shopoting companion General Neil Ritchie, Chief of Staff to Sir Claude Auchinleck, the British CinC, the high-risk raid went ahead. In telling the exciting but tragic story of its ultimate failure, Michael Asher, himself a former SAS member and now a desert explorer, does not spare the reputation of his old regiment's founder. He paints Stirling as a social climber whose reckless schemes cost good men's lives. A genuinely untold story of the war. See also the biography of Geoffrey Keyes for the story of one of the leaders of the Rommel Raid.