Grey Wolf
Donor
This kind of thread just lends itself to the simplistic “great men of history” view, devoid of context for the most part. Sure the generals get the plaudits when victorious and the blame when defeated, but there’s so much more going on, and of course we have the benefit of hindsight and the lack of any of the pressures they were working under.
True, but there is a lot of nuance in this thread from many people
For example, I am personally more critical of Rommel than most people, because he had no real idea of defensive warfare - his instinct was to retreat to the last fallback position then hold it. Sure, it was a good retreat, and done well, but as strategy it was nonsense. It was a tactical way of looking at things - thus in N Africa once on the backfoot he retreated across the ENTIRETY of Libya and into Tunisia. His plans for Italy would have been to retreat to the far North. In contrast, Kesselring got the idea of strategic retreat - it was to delay your opponents as long as possible, keep them as far away for as long as you could, and make their advance as bloody as possible. Rommel in charge of Italy would have seen the Allies sweep North. Kesselring in charge of Italy made them fight for every inch.
Contrariwse, if you are looking at Montgomery in North Africa he doesn't know what his opponent is doing. It would be quite a jump to assume he is planning to retreat as fast as possible to Tunisia. Strategic logic is that he would make a stand for it, and at the very least defend Tripoli and try to make a bloodbath of it. Montgomery's caution wasn't really a fault in this scenario - it was only when he got to the defensive line that Rommel had put across Southern Tunisia that Montgomery can have understood for sure what the enemy were doing.
If you look at the final play of this - sure, Rommel himself gets out, but Von Arnim has to surrender the vast majority of the German army at Tunis because there was nowhere else to retreat to.
If you compare that to someone like Von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during World War One, you can see that HIS view of a campaign in Africa was to keep the army in the field as long as possible, by any means, and tie down the enemy by so doing.
Rommel's view was that the campaign was lost, so what was the point of fighting it.
Now, I don't say Rommel was not good at going forward, and he could be quite inspirational in his successes. But he was a commander of two halves and one half, while tactically excellent (a fast withdrawal without significant losses in the face of pursuit) was strategically inept.
Best Regards
Grey Wolf