Great War Commanders: Haig, Pershing and Rommel

by Gordon Corrigan

‘Political, fluent, well-researched and extremely argumentative’ Andrew Roberts Gordon Corrigan examines Haig, Pershing and Rommel, detailing their lives, leadership and the legends surrounding them. General Winning At All Costs Very few figures in American military history are the subject of such violently opposing views as General John J Pershing (1860-1948). To his critics Pershing was intolerant, unapproachable, devoid of humour, a martinet, aloof, unsympathetic, a driver not a leader, unforgiving, scornful of the media, and interested only in the army to the exclusion of all else. Yet it was many of those characteristics that enabled him to create a functioning military force out of hundreds of thousands of raw recruits lacking in experience and depleted basic equipment handed to him. After his wife and three daughters died tragically in a house fire, Pershing dedicated his entire life to the army and he paid a crucial role in the success of WWI, and a smaller but still poignant advisory role in WWII, noticing early the dangers of a revanchist Nazi Germany. The creation of a general staff and his reform of the education system was his chief legacy and his memoirs won a Pulitzer Prize for History. This is the story of John J Pershing, one of America’s most famous and highly ranked military officers. Douglas Defeat Into Victory Some see Haig as the man who won the war for the Allies, defeating the German Army through a war of attrition on the Western Front. Others view him as an incompetent butcher, needlessly sacrificing the lives of thousands of young men for the price of a few metres of ground. The popular view of Haig today falls into the latter category - that he was unfitted to command Britain’s armies on the Western Front, that he was out of touch with what was happening at the front, and that he was indifferent to the suffering of his men. Is there evidence to support the criticisms of Haig? And if not, why do people believe them? Rommel's Great War Erwin Rommel was one of the greatest generals of World War Two. But who was he before he became the Desert Fox? Born in 1891, Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel did not come from a militaristic family, nor from the military stronghold of Prussia, but instead from a small town in southern Germany and son to a long line of schoolmasters. He joined the army in in 1910 at the age of eighteen, within one year he would rise to the rank of sergeant. As war broke out in Europe Rommel and his regiment marched out of the barracks to the sound of drums and cheering as they boarded the troop train to the western front. Gordon Corrigan provides expert analysis of World War One, both in terms of what it would have been like for a young officer like Rommel as well as the wider political and militaristic movements that were occurring at this time. Praise for Gordon 'Meticulously researched and well-written' Pennant Major Gordon Corrigan is a retired Gurkha officer, a member of the British Commission for Military History and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fluent in the Nepali language, he is now a freelance military historian and battlefield lecturer.

207 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2018