Germany Didn't Invent the Desert Fox. Britain Did. | Rommel, 1942

#Rommel #DesertFox #WW2 Everyone knows Rommel was the Desert Fox. Almost nobody knows who first called him that, and it was not Germany. In 1942, General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, wrote an order to his own commanders in the Western Desert. It was not about tactics, supply or ground. It was about a name, and he wanted the British Eighth Army to stop saying it. Germany built Erwin Rommel's fame first, and built it deliberately. Joseph Goebbels handed him a Leica camera before the 1940 campaign in France, where his 7th Panzer Division moved so fast through the Ardennes and across the Meuse that headquarters lost track of it and the Germans called it the Ghost Division. At Arras he came closer to defeat than at any point in France, and the report that reached Berlin told a tidier story. That summer the German Army High Command re-staged his crossing of the Somme for the propaganda film Victory in the West. It opened in Berlin in February 1941. That same month, the man in it landed in Libya. But the Desert Fox is not a German invention. The nickname came from the British side of the line, from the men losing to him across Cyrenaica in 1941, and nobody wrote down who said it first. There is no date. There is no first use. There is no name. This documentary follows what happened to that name. The Afrika Korps unloading at Tripoli, and a general who was ordered to hold a line and attacked instead. El Agheila, Benghazi, and a five hundred mile advance to the Egyptian frontier in under a month. The siege of Tobruk, which stopped him for eight months, and the fall of Tobruk in a single day in June 1942. Winston Churchill in the House of Commons calling Rommel a very daring and skilful opponent, and a great general, while the British Army was quietly trying to talk its own soldiers out of believing exactly that. Churchill sacking Auchinleck. General Gott shot down. Bernard Montgomery taking Eighth Army by accident. And El Alamein in October 1942, which opened while Rommel was on sick leave in Europe and Georg Stumme commanded the Panzer Army in his place. Then the part most Rommel documentaries leave out. His forced suicide at Herrlingen in October 1944, after which he could no longer contradict anybody about anything. Hans Speidel writing in 1946 that he intended to make Rommel the hero of the German people, at a moment when a discredited officer corps knew Germany would one day be asked to have an army again. Desmond Young publishing Rommel: The Desert Fox in 1950, with a foreword written by Auchinleck himself, printing inside it the very order Auchinleck had written to make Rommel smaller. And Basil Liddell Hart editing The Rommel Papers in 1953 into an argument about his own theories of armoured warfare, as the historian John Mearsheimer later demonstrated. This is not a takedown. Rommel was genuinely exceptional and this film says so plainly, more than once. The question is not whether he was a great general. It is how a real man's ability turned into a reputation that other people could use for purposes he never chose. A man can build his reputation. He cannot decide what everyone else needs it to mean. SOURCES Hansard, House of Commons, War Situation, 27 January 1942 Desmond Young, Rommel: The Desert Fox (1950) Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Grand Alliance (1950) B.H. Liddell Hart (ed.), The Rommel Papers (1953) Brian Horrocks, "The Rommel Myth Debunked" (1950) John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History Imperial War Museums, North Africa Campaign collections CREDITS Archival images: German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Individual references listed below. Archival footage: US National Archives and Records Administration, public domain. Parliamentary material: Hansard, UK Parliament, Open Parliament Licence. Music: Pixabay. The 1942 order shown on screen is a reconstruction. Text as published in Desmond Young, Rommel: The Desert Fox, 1950. Historical footage from the Second World War, presented in documentary and educational context. #ErwinRommel #RommelDocumentary #WW2Documentary #NorthAfricaCampaign #AfrikaKorps #ElAlamein #SiegeOfTobruk #Auchinleck #Churchill #Montgomery #MilitaryHistory #SecondWorldWar Chapter markers, rewritten You flagged this. The originals were written for click-through and carry almost no searchable entities. These keep the hook and add a name or a date, which is what the system reads. Time Marker 0:00 Auchinleck's Order: Stop Saying His Name 0:36 Before the Desert: Rommel in 1937 1:29 Goebbels Gave Him a Camera 3:37 They Filmed the Somme Crossing Twice 4:38 Tripoli, February 1941: Ordered to Hold, He Attacked 6:13 Tobruk Stops Him for Eight Months 7:38 Nobody Recorded Who Said "Desert Fox" First 8:49 Tobruk Falls in a Day, June 1942 9:39 Auchinleck Writes the Order 11:51 Churchill Praises Rommel in the Commons 13:50 El Alamein: Rommel Wasn't There