Steven Pressfield - Killing Rommel

WHEN my dad died, his closest friend came forward as a mentor and surrogate father to me. This was not without its challenges since Chaphis full name was R. Lawrence Chapmanlived in England, while my familys home was in Manhattan. Chaps profession was publishing, so he got to New York regularly on business; I remember him taking me to the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden every winter, in the days when the indoor track and field events were held in an arena so dense with cigarette smoke that you could barely see from one side to the other. Summers, I visited Chap and his wife, Rose, in London and at Roses brother Jocks cottage at Golspie in Scotland. Chap and Rose had a stepdaughter, Jessica, who was exactly my age, and two sons, Patrick and Tom, a couple of years older. The four of us were inseparable.

Chap had lost his own parents when he was quite young, so he was sensitive to the needs of a boy without a father. He took me trekking and fly-fishing; he taught me how to brew a cup of tea and how to write a declarative sentence. Chap was quite a celebrated editor and publisher; it was not unusual to find writers like Harold Pinter and John Osborne sitting down to supper. Chap was also, though he never talked about it, a war hero. He had won a DSO for his service in North Africa during World War II. DSO stands for Distinguished Service Order. The only British decoration higher is the Victoria Cross, the equivalent of our Medal of Honor. I was too young to understand much of this then, but I was impressed all the same.

I remember Rose showing me a photo album once at their flat in Knightsbridge. There was Rose, circa 1939, looking as glamorous as Gene Tierney in Laura. And young Lieutenant Chapman, as dashing as Tyrone Power. I squinted at yellowing snapshots of youthful Englishmen and New Zealanders of Chaps unit, the Long Range Desert Group, posing beside wilderness-rigged trucks armed with .30-caliber Brownings and twin .303 Vickers K machine guns. You could see the sand channels mounted on the vehicles flanksperforated steel tracks that the men used for extricating trucks stuck in the soft sand. Rose said that such patrols routinely crossed hundreds, even thousands of miles of waterless, petrol-less desert, where there was no mercy and no hope of rescue if anything went wrong.

Sometime in the early seventies, Chap began writing a memoir of this experience. I was eleven or twelve then; I remember Chap sending Jessica and me to the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane to look up Army records for him. The documents had only recently become declassified; there was a stamp on the first page of each that read

MOST SECRET TILL 1972

Jessica and I got five pence apiece from Chap for copying these papers, which was big money in those days. Chap worked at home in his study, a tiny cubby littered with his war journals and diaries, correspondence with former comrades, maps of North Africa and operations reports in English and German. I was fascinated. I plagued Chap with question after question, most of which he was patient enough to answer.

It was not till the early nineties, however, when I became a historian myself that my thoughts returned seriously to Chaps memoir. I was visiting him and Rose in Scotland; Chap and I were playing the Struie golf course, next door to Royal Dornoch. I asked what had happened with the document. It was in a drawer at home, Chap said. He had finished it but never shown it to anyone except Rose. I asked if I could see it.

No, no, its a mess. Besides, I cant publish it.

Chap expressed a number of reservations, largely about the personal nature of the material. He feared, he said, causing pain to the still-living widows and grown children of the men whose deaths he described in his pages. I could see that his own grief was deep and keenly felt. Still, as a writer, you cant let stuff like that stop you, and Chap knew it.

Can you at least tell me what the books about?

Its not even a book. JustI dont knowan account.

Of what?

Nothing really. One patrol. Not even a successful one.

I managed to drag out of Chap that the operations objective had been to locate and kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox.

Now I was really hooked. I pressed Chap to show me a few pages. He wouldnt budge. I accused him of being a chicken writer. He was exhibiting, I said, all the symptoms of publication terror that he always told me his own writers showed.

Cmon, Chap, you cant be tough on them while letting yourself off the hook.

Theyre professional writers, he said. Im not.

Back in the States, I found myself unable to let go of curiosity about Chaps story. I began researching the era. The Long Range Desert Group, I discovered, was one of the first of those units that would come to be called special forces. It had been based in Cairo and at various oases in the Libyan desert; its missions were raiding and reconnaissance behind enemy lines, against the Italians and Rommels Afrika Korps. The LRDG was small and secret. Rommel himself had declared that man for man it had done more damage to the Axis cause than any other outfit in the North African campaign.