The Desert Fox

Every soldier goes to war for something he believes. This is the story of what one of them found out.

Chicago, 1983. Freddie Lopez, a twelve-year-old from Fajardo, Puerto Rico, gets caught cheating on a history test because he got every answer wrong. His teacher, Mr. Bronner, an old Army veteran who never talks about his war, gives him a punishment nobody expected. He gives him a story.

It is the story of Erwin Rommel: a quiet, sickly schoolmaster's son from Württemberg whose family called him "the white bear." He survives the trenches of the Argonne and the mountains of Italy, writes a book that makes him famous, and in 1940 races his panzers across France so fast that even his own side loses track of him. Then Hitler sends him to Libya with two divisions and orders to do nothing. He does everything. Up and down a single coast road, across a desert where nothing lives, he becomes the most famous general of the war: the Desert Fox, admired even by the enemies who hunt him.

But behind the legend are the pages nobody wrote down. A debt to a young Jewish soldier from Laupheim who once saved his life in a shell crater. A wife in Germany who begs him to come home. A tank crew screaming target calls in the heat of Gazala. A Texan reading letters from home at a window in Cairo. A Libyan farmer whose date groves the armies drive through and never ask. And a regime that has quietly started keeping a folder with Rommel's name on it.

Told in short, cinematic chapters that move from Heidenheim to Tobruk, from Hitler's map room to a classroom on Chicago's Northwest Side, The Making of a Commander is a novel about war, loyalty, and the cost of believing, and about an old teacher who has been waiting thirty-eight years to tell a story he promised to keep.

Because Mr. Bronner knows things that aren't in any history book.

Book One of The Desert Fox trilogy.