Rommel and Generalship

In the first volume of his biography of Wavell, John Connell records that throughout the African campaign Rommel carried with him and carefully annotated the German translation of Wavell’s Lees-Knowles Lectures on the theme of Generals and Generalship which he delivered at Cambridge in 1939.

‘Many years later,’ Connell says, ‘Frau Rommel presented the battered and historic little volume to Lady Wavell.’

At Cambridge Wavell had an audience of between twenty and thirty undergraduates. But subsequently The Times published his lectures first as turn-over articles and then as a pamphlet; Penguin Books re-issued them; and they have been translated into a number of languages.

They were, in fact, an extraordinarily prescient analysis of the qualities a military leader would require in the war that Wavell predicted: they forecast Rommel.