YOUNG, Desmond. Rommel. With a Foreword by Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck. London, Collins, 1950.
8vo. Original maroon cloth with illustrated dust-wrappers (not price-clipped), map endpapers, pp. 288, plates after photographs, a litle spotting to endpapers, apart from light toning and margiuanl fraying of wrappers in places a near-fine copy.
First edition, first printing. 'Brigadier Desmond Young, having himself been one of Rommel's victims, decided to trace the story of the man and to examine the sources of the legend' (inside front flap of wrapper). The author had been captured during the 1942 Battle of Gazala and briefly met the German commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He escaped from imprisonment in Italy and ended the war as editor of a pro-Allied newspaper in Switzerland. This book, the first on Rommel, as far as we know, was later used for the 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel.
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