Mitcham Jr., Samuel W. Rommel's Lieutenants: The Men Who Served the Desert Fox, France, 1940. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006 ISBN: 0-275-99185-7 Pages: xiv + 202 Preface; maps; photos; Notes; Bibliography; Index of Military Units; General Index Appendices: Comparative Ranks; German Staff Positions; Characteristics of Selected German and Allied Tanks Mitcham Jr., Samuel W. Rommel's Desert Commanders: The Men Who Served the Desert Fox, North Africa, 1941-1942. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007 ISBN: 0-275-99436-8 Pages: x + 214 Preface; maps; photos; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   Half empty or half full?
   These two volumes from Samuel Mitcham come billed as biographical collections ("The men who served the Desert Fox") although they're often more about operations in which the men participated rather than about the men themselves. The author has poured a great deal of information into both books, but different readers will likely form widely varying opinions of them, because in some ways he's done so in a manner likely to cause as much frustration as satisfaction, especially in the second one.
   Although published under separate covers, in separate years, and with somewhat separate approaches, Rommel's Lieutenants and Rommel's Desert Commanders could really have been combined into a single title. On the other hand, they could also comprise the first two volumes of a trilogy. Lieutenants provides sketches of key officers who served under Rommel during the 1940 campaign in France while Commanders looks at his principal subordinates in Africa. We don't have any inside information on Mitcham's plans, but it seems like a third tome—maybe "Rommel's Generals in the West, 1944"—would be a natural.
   In any event, Rommel's Lieutenants includes sixteen different officers. Mitcham explains that these gentlemen provided Rommel "a great deal of help in France" and that his "...staff officers and company, battalion, and regimental commanders were an extremely capable collection of military leaders, which included 12 future generals (two of them SS), and two colonels who briefly commanded panzer divisions but never reached general rank...." That does indeed seem like an impressive array of brass, but the book never puts those numbers in context by comparing this achievement with the number of future generals who served under other commanders in other units during the campaign in France.
   Whatever the relative numbers of future generals, these are the men Mitcham profiles in the first book:

• Karl Rothenburg: Hero of Two Wars
• Rudolf Sieckenius: The Scapegoat
• Karl August Hanke: Nazi Politician
• Joachim von Metzsch: The Supply Officer
• Dr. Wilhelm Baumeister: The Medical Officer
• Hans von Luck: The Charming Aristocrat
• Joachim Ziegler: The SS General
• Gottfried Froelich: The Saxon Gunner
• Georg von Bismarck: The Prussian Junker
• Friedrich Fuerst: The Second in Command
• Friedrich-Carl von Steinkeller: The Motorcycle Commander
• Hans Joachim von Kronhelm: The Heavy Artillery Commander
• Eduard Crasemann: The War Criminal
• Frido von Senger und Etterlin: The Snobbish Aristocrat
• Otto Heidkaemper: The Chief of Staff
• Johann Mickl: The Austrian Mountaineer

   As can be seen, these are not the usual suspects commonly found in other books compiling bios of key German leaders such as Hitler's Generals by Correlli Barnett or Mitcham's earlier Hitler's Field Marshals. The officers profiled here are very interesting, but mostly not as well known or as high ranking. Their biographies are presented in straightforward fashion—ranging from two pages to more than a dozen—dealing with the entire life of each soldier including birth, education, military service, and eventual fate. In almost all cases, the action in France in 1940 provides a very small part of each biographical chapter. Instead, the careers of the sixteen soldiers prove varied enough so that the book touches on almost the entire spectrum of Germany's ground campaigns from 1939 through 1945. Consequently, while Mitcham has chosen these men based on their service under Rommel in 1940, that campaign is clearly not the subject of the book.
   Here's a brief excerpt to give a feel for Mitcham's approach:

   Meanwhile, Sieckenius conducted a perfectly orchestrated withdrawal to the Avellino-Olfante line. He personally commanded the rearguard and inflicted heavy damage on the U.S. VI Corps around Teora on September 24-25.
   With the German right flank secured, Sieckenius was called to stabilize the left, where Montgomery's British 8th Army had secured a bridgehead over the Biferno River at Termolin [sic], near the Adriatic coast. The division made a long 95-mile road march along the difficult mountain roads of the Apennines during the night of October 4-5. As a result, it was badly strung out and went into battle against the British piecemeal. In a tough battle against two British armored brigades, Sieckenius lost most of his remaining armor, mainly to British air strikes. Now a burned out unit at kampfgruppe (regimental) strength, the 16th Panzer covered the retreat of the LXXVI Panzer Corps to the north. It was, however, unable to prevent Montgomery's commandos from seizing a small bridgehead across the Trigno, south of the town of Vesta. The bridgehead was quickly sealed off by the 16th Panzer, and the entire Allied advance was halted by the onset of the rainy season, which turned the entire country into mud.
   Meanwhile, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the OB South and commander-in-chief of Army Group C, had promised Hitler he would hold the Volturno-Biferno line until at least October 16. He had failed, and now Berlin was demanding scapegoats. For no good reason, Rudolf Sieckenius and the 16th Panzer Division were selected. Sieckenius was relieved of his command on October 31, 1943, and his career was ruined.
   How Hitler, OKW, and OKH could have found any legitimate cause for dissatisfaction with the performance of the 16th Panzer is impossible to understand. It fought the Battle of Salerno almost single-handedly and, despite the tremendous odds against it, narrowly failed to throw the Americans back into the sea. It then checked the U.S. VI Corps at Teora and, after a difficult forced march, stabilized the German left flank against greatly superior British forces. In the process, it lost more than half of its men and most of its tanks and artillery. Despite its truly heroic efforts, however, the divisional history records that not one member of the 16th Panzer Division was awarded the Knight's Cross or the German Cross in Gold in September or October 1943.
   General Sieckenius was placed in Fuehrer Reserve in Kassel, Wehrkreis IX, and his rank was permanently frozen. He was forced to take a course in National Socialist Leadership Procedure, as well as the short Division Commanders' Course, which was given only to officers who had been earmarked to command a division but had not yet done so (unless it was briefly and on a temporary basis only). This was an insult, because he had already commanded a division in combat and had done so with considerable skill. Thoroughly bewildered and frustrated, he was unemployed until February 21, 1944, when he was ordered to report to the Army Personnel Office in Berlin. He was attached to the 1st Bureau as a reserve division commander. A month later, he was sent to Army Group North in Russia for use as a backup division commander, to be used if a regular divisional commander went on leave, was wounded, or was killed.

   Although his text is footnoted, the bulk of the notes provide biographical data about other German officers who served with the main subjects of the book. For example, the first footnote in the chapter on Karl Hanke leads to a paragraph about the life of Joseph Berchtold, the original Reichsfuehrer SS. Welcome as such supporting information can be, while using the notes for that purpose Mitcham often fails to use them to indicate his sources for the unusual facts and events in his chapters. In the chapter on Hans von Luck, for example, the author writes, speaking of the German 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion withdrawing from Siwa Oasis and its skirmishes with the Royal Dragoons and 11th Hussars, "Within the first few days, the three battalions had established a gentlemen's agreement, whereby all hostilities ended at 5 PM, and they exchanged information on prisoners via radio." Surely that's worth mentioning a source and offering a bit of corroboration!
   Nevertheless, as a whole Rommel's Lieutenants seems like an engaging, suitably organized book about relatively unknown officers with eventful lives.
   The first chapter of Rommel's Desert Commanders, "The Sources of Rommel's Officers," recapitulates material from the first chapter (of the same name) in Rommel's Lieutenants. Beyond that, for some reason not entirely obvious, Mitcham has organized the second volume in a different fashion. Instead of offering a series of chapters each with the biography of one individual, this book is constructed more like a chronological treatment of the war in North Africa.
   Here are the chapters:

• The First Cyrenaican Campaign
• The Siege of Tobruk
• Crusader
• The Gazala Line and Tobruk
• The Staff
• El Alamein
• The Other Commanders

   Within each of the chapters, Mitcham maintains the basic thread of the ongoing campaign in Africa, but he constantly digresses to discuss the careers of the officers who are taking part in the desert action. As a result, the book doesn't really provide a complete history of the Afrika Korps, and the bulk of the book comprises actions involving Rommel's officers in other theaters during their other wartime assignments. In that sense, Rommel's Desert Commanders resembles Rommel's Lieutenants, but in this case, unlike the first book, readers can't easily turn to the biography of a specific officer, because they're hidden away within the text. The index helps, but the table of contents should list the men covered in each chapter. That enhancement would prevent the frustration of trying to discover whose biographies are included in the book and where they're located.
   Due to the way the books are organized, Mitcham also excludes some pertinent information about the campaign in Libya and Egypt from the second volume because the relevant commander is contained in the first. For example, Mitcham does a perfectly acceptable job with Georg von Bismarck's bio in Rommel's Lieutenants, including, along with two pages on other aspects of his career, about eight pages on von Bismarck in Africa. In the second book, the information on this important desert commander is limited to two paragraphs and a note to refer to the earlier book.
   Despite that organizational problem, the author covers a large number of Rommel's officers in the second book, sometimes providing a high level of detail and other times relying on more formulaic outlines of familiar events rather than strictly biographical material. Mitcham simultaneously injects a fair amount of personal opinion. Regarding Fritz Bayerlein, for example, he writes "Bayerlein's abilities as a commander are, in my view, highly overrated by British and American historians." He goes on to enumerate some of the general's shortcomings, and in particular has this to say: "Certainly Bayerlein's performance during the Battle of the Bulge was very poor, and, on one critical day, he was more interested in seducing a captured American nurse than in the activities of his division." Mitcham offers no further explanation of this rather sensational accusation, and his footnote (and bibliographic entry) only mentions an unpublished manuscript by Friedrich von Stauffenberg "in the possession of the author."
   Mitcham certainly embellishes another incident, this one involving Wilhelm von Thoma after he became a POW in Tunisia and was transferred to the UK.

   Thoma made perhaps the most serious mistake of his military career as a prisoner of war. On March 22, 1943, during a conversation with another former commander of the Afrika Korps, he told General Cruewell of a secret rocket-testing facility located at Peenemunde on the Baltic coast. Unknown to the Germans, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) planted a microphone in the room. The SIS thus learned the location of one of the Third Reich's most important secret bases.

   That story, as Mitcham tells it, turns out not to be entirely accurate. While it's true the SIS bugged the conversation with Cruewell, in the taped exchange von Thoma only mentioned that he had seen "huge things...[that] would go 15 km into the atmosphere...." at an entirely different location. The general never specifically mentioned V-weapons and certainly never named Peenemunde, because he learned about the rockets elsewhere. For a much more detailed and precise explication of this incident, see British Intelligence in the Second World War, volume 3, part 1: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations by Harry Hinsley or The Wizard War by R.V. Jones, both of which contain the actual transcript of the bugged conversation.
   Unfortunately, those kinds of peculiar, unsubstantiated details—von Luck's local truce, Bayerlein's dalliance with an American nurse, and von Thoma revealing the existence of Peenemunde—can bring the remainder of both Mitcham volumes into question.
   Regrettably, in some quarters the author already has a reputation for being more concerned with quantity than quality. These two works contain a great deal of interesting information, but in at least a couple of instances it appears to be less than fully reliable, or at least not fully documented. Does that make the books half empty, half full, or just full of something?
   We're not ready to write these off entirely, but at this point we can't whole-heartedly recommend them either.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Praeger.
   Thanks to Praeger for providing these review copies.