Rommel, The Desert Fox

Rommel showed early signs of his potential when in 1915, he earned the coveted Iron Cross 1st class for an audacious battlefield action. Rommell never asked his troops to do what he himself would not do. Using revolutionary tactics, he rewrote the rules of tank warfare and many times overcame superior odds. It was at the head of Panzer Group Afrika, the famed Afrika Korps, that Rommel shaped history, single-handedly reversing the course of the North African War. After failing to persuade Hitles to abandoned the doomed fortress Europe strategy, Rommel took poison when he was implicated in a plot to murder Hitler.