Rommel’s Peace - Book Review

Alexander Wilson | August 19, 2008  | one comment  | Print  | E-mail

Rommel’s Peace. By Lawrence Wells. Yoknapatawpha Press, 2008. 201 pages. Paperback. US $14.95.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle Rommel has to face is himself.

Rommel’s Peace—a sequel to Rommel and the Rebel, Lawrence Wells’ earlier novel—is a fast-paced, fictional work which takes as its basis a presumption that German field marshal Erwin Rommel sent out peace feelers to the Western Allies prior to D-Day. Wells ties in one of the main characters from his first book, U.S. Army Lieutenant Max Speigner, with Rommel’s efforts to establish a cease-fire with the British and Americans before D-Day commences.

The story is set in occupied France, May 1944, where Rommel—disgruntled with Hitler, depressed by the progress of the war, and ashamed of the vile acts committed by the Nazis, primarily against the Jews—has decided to take a major gamble: he will attempt to contact the British and Americans and arrange a cease-fire with them on the Western Front.

In his attempt to contact Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, Rommel plucks Speigner out of a POW camp in Bavaria and sends him to Britain with a message of peace. “We, many of us, are ashamed to have fought in the service of a madman . . . Now is the time to stop fighting, go home, repair the damage. We shall punish those responsible for terrorizing civilians, for what has been done to the Jews,” he tells Speigner, before sending him to Britain. However, as the events in the novel play out—those based on fact and those completely fictional—Rommel’s dream of peace on the Western Front slowly becomes less and less possible and eventually ceases to exist altogether.

His first obstacle is the Allied policy of unconditional surrender. The Allies’ attitude towards the Soviets also poses a problem—a major condition of Rommel’s surrender offer is that the Germans be allowed to retain their weapons and transfer all of their manpower from the Western to the Eastern Front. The field marshal hopes the Allied leaders will agree with him when he says that the British, Americans and Germans all have a mutual enemy in the Communists of the Soviet Union. Of course, there is always Hitler to worry about. Odds are the Fuhrer will not take kindly to any mention of the word “peace.”

Yet, perhaps the greatest obstacle Rommel has to face is himself. Although a highly talented strategist and tactician, his skills as a diplomat are poor, to say the least. He has no knowledge of how to effectively, yet clandestinely, establish contact with Churchill and SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). His planning and orders to Speigner before the ex-POW departs for Britain are vague and not well thought out. Rommel, master of mechanized warfare, is depicted as amazingly unskilled and almost naïve when it comes to diplomacy. When Speigner asks, “What am I to say when the British pick me up?” Rommel simply shrugs his shoulders and replies, “Tell them you have a message for Ike.”

Whether or not the Desert Fox really would have been that diplomatically clumsy, and whether or not he would have been able to establish a solid contact with the Allies, are topics for debate.

Of course, Rommel ultimately fails in his effort to establish a cease-fire. At every turn, the double-headed monster comprised of his lack of diplomatic finesse and the magnitude of the difficulties he faces rears its ugly head.

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Tags: Book review, Historical Figures, World War II