The year is 1942. The United States has just entered World War II, but England still stands almost alone against the Axis powers. Germany's Afrika Korps and their Italian allies, led by legendary Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, have driven the British army back into Egypt. If Egypt falls, the British will lose the Middle East and its oil fields. That would force the Soviet Union to make peace with Germany. The Nazis can still win the war.
The British formulate an audacious plan: to send the Long Range Desert Group, a special-forces unit that conducts raids and reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines, to find and kill Rommel.
"Killing Rommel" (Broadway, 2008, $16), which was released in paperback last month, is historical fiction, but much of the story is true. In many ways, "Killing Rommel" is the perfect summer read. Author Steven Pressfield's writing elevates the book far above most of today's popular fiction. It's a ripping adventure story, told in a compact 285 pages. It is also a thoughtful and moving meditation on the morality of war.
Lt. R. Laurence Chapman is the narrator who volunteers for the LRDG. Chapman is drawn to the group because he believes it offers a chance for an individual to make a difference, adding, " there was something far deeper to my desire to serve with this group of men. It had to do with the desert, the inner desert. I wanted to go there. I knew only that I needed to place myself past where others had been, beyond where I had been myself."
What Chapman finds in the desert is a crucible where men and machines are tested to the limits of their endurance and beyond. And he finds that in war, it's kill or be killed. But then a solider has to find a way to live with what he's done.
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