ROMMEL IN NORMANDY - France 1940

Rommel's passage through Normandy in June 1940 is often overshadowed.

The author sought to highlight this brief episode, which was far from straightforward for his division, which nonetheless captured three Norman ports.

Ancelle, Boos, Elbeuf, Yvetot, Fécamp, Saint-Valery-en-Caux, Le Havre, L'Aigle, La Haye-du-Puits, Marinvast, Cherbourg — Rommel is one of the most popular generals of the German army of the Second World War. He was a young officer among many when the First World War broke out. He distinguished himself in France as well as in Italy, to the point of being decorated with the Pour le Mérite cross. The armistice and the Treaty of Versailles represented for him the collapse of a world. He soon saw in Hitler the embodiment of the idea of the nation as he had dreamed it, and became one of the Führer's inner circle. This earned him prominence in German propaganda, and his popularity soon reached new heights, above all after his exploits at the head of the 7. Panzerdivision in France in 1940, and then of the Afrikakorps in North Africa from 1941 to 1943.

From January 1944, he organised the Atlantic Wall. Wounded during the Battle of Normandy, by which time he had already distanced himself from Hitler and was aware of the generals' plot, he would never return to the front, but was forced into suicide by the Nazis, Hitler sparing him the ignominy of a trial.