![]() ![]() As yet his reputation did not extend much beyond his immediate milieu. Men saw, and men spoke: “Everybody was inspired by his initiative, his courage, his dazzling acts of gallantry,” noted one of Rommel’s platoon leaders. ![]() He had won the Iron Cross in France in 1914, and in Romania he had bolstered his reputation for fearlessness by leading from the front and for a tactical sense that seemed to intuit an enemy’s moves. Obscure though young Rommel might have been, he was hardly anonymous. ![]() But in 1917 he was an obscure junior officer, one of thousands in a war where a subaltern’s average lifespan was measured in weeks. He would also become a symbol of soldiers’ honor misused and perverted by the Third Reich. Rommel would eventually master maneuver warfare, reach the rank of field marshal and become one of the most feared of World War II battlefield commanders. Serving in one of them was 1st Lieutenant Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel. The assault was an all-or-nothing gamble, and Germany had committed some of its best units to the mission. They were massing for an intended decisive counterattack against an Italian army that in the previous two years had worn the Habsburg army and German Empire to the limits of their endurance. Conditions were wet, dark and overcast- “attack weather” to the 15 German and Austro-Hungarian divisions moving into final position. 24, 1917, it began to rain in Italy’s Isonzo River valley. ![]()
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