Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
I'd have to bet on GSP, he had a cavalryman's instinct for the pursuit that was hard to beat.
Rommel was an infantry officer, while he pulled some wonderful moves, a lot of them were handed to him by the Brits. To throw three armored brigades along three different axis at threes different times simply allowed the Africa Corps to nail each brigade one at a time. Rommel was an excellent division commander, he just didn't have the feel for corps/army level.
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I would tend to agree with you he was a great Division Officer, then again looking at the Afrika Corps OOB, and later the Afrikaarrmee was an oversize German Division with several allied Italian troops going along for the ride. One thing to remember he did the more with lot less, than many other German Generals were asked to do.
He proved himself both in Poland and France at the beginning of the war. Given that he never went to the Eastern Front you can't really judge how he would compared to Corps commanders out there. One thing was that him and Montgomery probably owe their Field Marshal rank to each other. Otherwise I don't see either going beyond Corps commanders much less leaders of rival Armies and later Army Groups. Every war has General or two who make in command of units that they should never have been allowed to command, but since they were Great Regiment/Brigade commanders they would naturally be Excellent Division commanders and so forth on up...