Greaseman Howard Stern ABC News Story

It starts off shaky, but eventually hits its stride, so bear with it..you'll get a taste of both the Greaseman and Howard Stern at their peak in the 80s/90s.

Spirit of Radio

I’m not a big fan of radio, either for music or for talk radio.  I never listen to the radio in my apartment – I can’t be bothered to hook up any sort of antenna – and in the car I listen to the CD player 90% of the time.  The radio tends to come on if, due to some oversight, I have no CDs to listen to in the car.  But here are my opinions on the topic anyway.

 Talk Radio

Unlike music, I don’t have various personalities in my apartment, in my car, or on CD, talking about various different issues.  These are people mostly speaking live and commenting on events as they occur.  Relative to music, I consider talk radio to be a more appropriate use of the medium.  Even so, I listen to mere minutes of talk radio a month, only in the car, and only if I don’t have a CD to listen to. 

 G. Gordon Liddy.  Back in the 90s he was on WJFK 106.7, which is our primary talk radio station in the DC area (see Don & Mike).  I enjoyed him for along time, as he always had interesting guests on the show and a fairly intelligent way of discussing things.  When I worked for Jerry, we’d listen to him all the time – I even answered the office phone “G. Gordon Liddy’s office” by mistake.  My buddy John met him at the Denny’s in Fairfax and got him to sign his books. He did come off as somewhat of a know-it-all, though, and it annoyed me when he’d go off on subjects like cars which he didn’t really know about – but thought he did.  Moreover, callers would call in to ask his advice on topics well beyond his realm of knowledge – the FBI, prison, Watergate, guns, being a federal prosecutor, etc.  He would promote his “Stacked & Packed Calendars”, claiming the women were astonishing knockouts – then we’d buy the damn thing and scratch our heads.  Either he needs his eyes checked, or his standards of feminine beauty were remarkably low – only one or two of the women would be anywhere close to as attractive as he described.  I’ve read Will, his autobiography, and his two novels The Monkey Handlers and Out of Control.  So far as I know, Liddy is still on the air, but on some satellite radio station, Radio America.

 Rush Limbaugh.  I was never a Rush Limbaugh fan.  Although I tend to agree with his politics, his bombastic and pompous attitude was tiresome after awhile.  He also had a nasty habit of focusing 80% of the show’s content on Hillary Clinton.  The way he described it, Hillary woke up every morning cursing Limbaugh and his show for exposing her lies and agenda.  Somehow I doubt it.

 Howard Stern.  I listened to him briefly when he was on WJFK.  I notice that he and Robin are fairly intelligent and well-informed, but the other idiots on the show and the callers are atrociously stupid.  The impression I get is that the FCC fines the show suffered were due not to anything Stern himself said on the air, but what his callers said.  If there was ever any sort of “Idiocracy” eugenics program to eliminate grossly stupid people from the gene pool by sterilizing them, the first group targeted should be anyone who called into Howard Stern’s show.  Group #2 would be audience members and guests on the Jerry Springer show.

Although Stern would often have strippers and porn stars on the show, this has two drawbacks.  First, it’s RADIO, so we can’t see these women even if they stripped nude in the studio (can we hear her breasts??).  Second, even on the cable show, invariably broadcast long after any child’s bedtime, 100% of the nudity is pixilated out.  As a practical matter, the only way to experience any of the nudity would be to show up in person.  You’d be better off taking a note of who the porn star was and simply buying or renting her movies.  So Stern’s show is really more of a tease than anything truly satisfying.  Currently he’s on Sirius, formerly on WJFK.

 Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht.  Currently on Rock 105 in Jacksonville, Florida.  Like Stern, he tends to get in trouble and fired, but unlike Stern it tends to be stuff that he says himself, and it’s invariably grossly racist.  Having said that, the majority of his material was simply over-the-top stories involving cops, Sgt Fury, sex, masturbation, or other bizarre topics.  I tended to find it mildly entertaining and not at all offensive.  Tracht himself is fairly bulky (works out all the time) and used to be a deputy sheriff in Falls Church.

 Don Imus.  I really don’t like Imus.  Not that it has anything to do with “nappy headed hos” or his radio jihad with Howard Stern, I just think of him as not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.  His humor reminds me of Mark Russell and the other pretentious political humorists you might see at the Kennedy Center.  Right now he’s on WJZW 105.9 in this area (formerly WCXR, see below).

 Dr. Laura.  My parents loved her show.  I noticed a fair amount of callers would be women asking her permission to cheat on their husbands, violate court orders they didn’t agree with, or do some other unethical or unsavory behavior which anyone, with half a brain and an iota of understanding of who Dr Laura was, could predict she would completely disagree with.  Or maybe those were just the callers when I was listening.

 Don & Mike.  Don Geronimo retired in April 2008 so now it’s the the “Mike O’Meara” show.  Of the two, I preferred Don anyway.  They were actually in Northern Virginia, based at WJFK even though they are syndicated nationwide.  At best I found their show occasionally entertaining, but several things really turned me off:

1.  Inside jokes about Buzz, Rob Spewak (sic), Dennis Murphy (whoever that mushmouth guy was who would always call in), Joe Ardinger, etc.  Even when I knew who they were talking about, it was still annoying.  Moreover, they would always interrupt Buzz when he was trying to read the news, with inane and stupid remarks leftover from whatever they were discussing before the news segment started.

2.  Busting on other DJs.  With regard to the Greaseman, who they would crucify mercilessly, it was kicking him when he was down and shamelessly pandering to their minority listeners.  With regard to other DJs, it tended to be talking about how lame the other shows were, how other DJs ripped them off, and other petty issues.  Whatever accusations of lameness were leveled at competing DJs, I’d heard enough of their own show to know they applied equally well to them.  Enough.

3.  “Arbitron ratings”.  A certain portion of the show was devoted to them bragging about their ratings, to talking about inside stuff on the industry, and going on and on about how they were renewing contracts in certain markets, doing well in some, poorly in others, and other dull minutiae about the business side of their show.

4.  When you subtracted all that other stuff, the actual original content of the show was very low.  Probably the one thing that ever enjoyed was listening to Don go on about his own personal life.  Mike always seemed to be bragging about himself, while Don would be more evenhanded on his own account.  Overall, though the show was the “someone gave us a radio show so we can say whatever we want and mistreat the callers” show.

 Opie & Anthony.  Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia.  For awhile they were on WJFK, now they’re on satellite radio (XM and Sirius) and two regular stations, WRXK 92.3 in New York and WROX FM 96.1 in Norfolk, Virginia.  Originally I didn’t like these guys, they came off as a coarser, raunchier version of Don & Mike.  Some of the stunts were pathetically stupid: this “sex across Manhattan” thing that got them fired (again, sex/nudity on the radio….unclear on the concept!) and one where they tried to get an intern so drunk that he’d puke.  If there was anything I liked about them was that they were big fans of AC/DC, Black Sabbath, etc. the same music I listened to, and were pretty much of the same scene and age.  They also made a “Smokey and the Bandit” reference l liked, so that was cool.  But as with Don & Mike, this was another “some idiot gave us a radio show, so we’ll pretty much say what we want” deal.

 Ron & Fez.   These were two geeks from NYC.  Why anyone gave these two a show is one of the mysteries of the universe.  More of this “put a microphone in front of two guys and let them simply talk about nothing” idiocy.  They weren’t really stupid, per se, so much as dull and not particularly interesting. 

 The Sports Junkies/Big O & the Dukes.  These are a bunch of frat rats from the DC area.  Every time I listen to WJFK, no matter what time, it seems they’ve grabbed the slot.  For the life of me I can’t tell the difference between the two shows, and can’t even tell if they’re the same guys or what.  Both shows are/were exactly the same: a bunch of frat rats, from the DC area, talking about sports and their social lives, busting on each other incessantly.  The Sports Junkies used to do this really annoying thing of reducing everyone’s name – except some guy “Lurch” – to initials.  They are also the types to get obsessed with sports statistics and have the sports nut’s obnoxious, arrogant tendency to talk like they’re experts on every single sport – EXCEPT soccer, which they make it a point to be militantly indifferent to, except knowing that Beckham plays for the L.A. Galaxy (so they can bitch that L.A. doesn’t have an NFL team). 

 Music

You would think I’d prefer music on the radio than talk.  But I guess I’m stupid: why listen to music on the radio when you can listen to music on the tape deck, record player, CD player, iTunes, etc.?  I have the CDs, etc. and know how to use the equipment.  Why should I let some DJ determine what I’m going to hear?  If I want to hear it, I probably have it on CD already.  If I want to be surprised, I’ll select the party mix feature on iTunes to shuffle things around.  One thing DJs do not do, is play obscure songs you can’t find on CD (with the very rare exception of radio-broadcast concerts or studio sessions – which eventually end up on CD anyway).  The songs by any band that get played on the radio are the most popular ones, thus if you like the band you probably have the song already.  And in this day of $.99 songs on iTunes, if you like the song but don’t want to buy the whole album, you can buy the song on iTunes and listen to it whenever you want. 

 Having said that, I’ll review the music radio scene, all of which is local to my area, Washington DC & Baltimore, with one major exception:

 WSOU 89.5.  This is the Seton Hall University radio station, in Orange, New Jersey (89.5).  When I visited Ken, I’d tune in to this after getting up to around exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike.  This station would play heavy metal, including lots of thrash AND obscure tracks (“Sabbra Cadabra” and “Megalomania” by Black Sabbath).

 WIYY 98 Rock.  This is the heaviest station in the DC area.  At 10 p.m. they play “Mandatory Metallica” (3 tracks from various albums).  You won’t anything heavier than Metallica, but you’ll hear plenty of the harder edge of classic rock.

 WWDC DC101.  This used to be classic rock, almost identical to 105.9.  The latter switched to soft jazz, and then much later DC101 switched to a more progressive rock format.  By progressive I don’t mean King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, etc., I mean stuff like R.E.M. – the typical R.E.M. fan being some skinny guy in glasses who drives a VW and is not only very liberal but also an intellectual snob.  His idea of winning an argument is to state his position and then say “…duh!”  Either that or slap it on the back of their used Volvo in the form of a clever bumper sticker. 

 WCXR 105.9.  No longer in business, they used to be simply classic rock and abruptly changed formats.  I heard “Blowing Free” by Wishbone Ash on this station.

 WARW 94.7.  Formerly “Arrow” and now “Globe”, though still pretty much classic rock.  If you want to hear Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc. this is the station to listen to.

 WHFS 99.1.  This is THE progressive rock station here, basically the R.E.M. station.  I’d check out the band listing for their HFstival and realize: I have no use for any of them.  Awhile back they had an ad campaign which said “evolve” – implying that 98 Rock listeners were inarticulate Neanderthals, whereas WHFS listeners had “evolved” into homo sapiens.   

 XM & Sirius.  Hmm, I rarely listen to the radio that’s free, why should I pay for it?  Aside from “no commercials” – which is true when I listen to my CDs etc. on my own stereo – what is the advantage? I still can’t see the strippers on the Howard Stern show – it’s still radio.  No thanks.

Bloodrock - Lucky in the Morning

This was the only footage I could find on YouTube of this band from its original era (aside from clips of the reunion show). Not my favorite song, but it is fairly representative. Enjoy!

Bloodrock

MORE obscure rock – as if Brazilian & Italian progressive rock from the 70s wasn’t weird enough.

 This was a band from Fort Worth, Texas, who had their very brief peak from 1970-72.  They were discovered by Terry Knight, famously associated with Grand Funk Railroad. Their classic lineup, with which they recorded their first 4 albums Bloodrock, Bloodrock 2, Bloodrock 3 (which I have on 8 track as well as CD), Bloodrock USA (with its cool cartoon cover) and the live album Bloodrock Live, was Jim Rutledge (vocals), Lee Pickens (guitar), Nick Taylor (guitar), Ed Grundy (bass), Stevie Hill (keyboards) and Rick Cobb (drums).  

 Their “hit” was “D.O.A.”, a chilling song about a man who survives a plane crash, only to find himself critically injured and seriously disoriented in a hospital bed.  I’ve even heard the Greaseman (off-color DJ from DC, similar to Howard Stern) refer to “D.O.A.”, and also read a reference in the Washington Post Style section.  My favorites are “A Fantastic Piece of Architecture”, “Breach of Lease”, “Magic Man”, “Kool Aid Kids”, “Cheater” and “Jessica” (no, not the Allman Brothers song). 

 With most bands, although they invariably end up with “greatest hits” which appear on all the compilations and live albums, there are also quite a few forgotten gems which get lost in the mix and only remembered by die hard fans. Bloodrock (the first album) is solid throughout, whereas on Bloodrock 2 and 3, the songs which ended up on Live are in fact the best songs.

 After USA, Rutledge and Pickens left, replaced by Warren Ham.  With him they did two albums, Passage and Whirlwind Tongues, and a third unreleased album, Unspoken Words.  These three feature flute – sounding very much like Jethro Tull – and a more progressive (!) direction.  I’m not too crazy about these albums, as the quality is way down from the prior ones, an experiment which really did not work.

 They had a reunion show recently, on March 12, 2005, which I picked up on DVD.  They played at the Ridglea Theater in Fort Worth, Texas, which was strange – a high ceiling and very bright lighting – but the band nailed the songs down well, almost verbatim from Bloodrock Live, and appeared thrilled to be doing it again once more for a very appreciative audience.  Setlist: “Castle of Thoughts”, “Lucky In the Morning”, “Breach of Lease” (my favorite), “Doublecross”, “Jessica”, “D.O.A.” (of course), “Kool-Aid Kids”, “Children’s Heritage”, “You Gotta Roll”, and “Song For A Brother”. 

For some reason, their music takes me back to the 70s growing up in the US, in a way few other bands can achieve – in fact, this band, more than any other (including KISS or Grand Funk Railroad), seems to do that best.  Although I was only a kid back then, far from even high school, the songs evoke high schools, 70s cars, 8 tracks, and all the things we usually associate with that era, for those of us old enough to remember it, however vague our memories might be.  The music acts as a strange sort of hypnotism, casting our minds back, so if we close our eyes and simply listen, it’s almost like we’re really back there – like Christopher Reeve traveling back to the turn of the century in “Somewhere in Time”. 

More Proletarian Adventures

Much earlier I had described my pre-law adventures.  I had left out the fast food experience, and have some post-law experiences to share as well – for those who bother to read these things. [In this case, I preferred to use images from “Clerks II” – particularly that impressively delicious poster of Rosario Dawson...sorry, I couldn’t resist!]

 Dining Services.  This was 6 weeks in fall 1987, my sophomore year at University of Maryland.  To earn some extra cash, I joined my comrades Woody, Chip and Bill at the Food Court at the Stamp Union.  Mostly my work was at the pizza stand, but I also spent some time at the sub shop and the ice cream stand. 

 Pizza.  I didn’t actually make any pizzas, I simply served various slices.  I love pizza and have strong tolerance for wide varieties in quality, but this was the most horrible, disgusting pizza I ever had.  Something about the cheese, I don’t know.  It was also an excellent place to burn yourself fairly often, which was unpleasant.  And I recall various shady characters showing up at closing to ask for free pizza, since we had to throw away anything left over before cleaning up.

 Subs.  I was only here briefly.  This pissed me off because the subs were wrapped in tin foil, then placed in a superheated drawer.  They were made fairly simple (not by me) and wrapped up and placed in this drawer, and had to be opened up and modified to the customer’s particular order.  All hot hot hot.  And this was before I had ever tasted one, so they weren’t my type of food.

 Ice Cream.  Ah, this was more like it.  Finally a place where 99% of the items were cold, with the obvious exception of hot fudge.  I learned to make milk shakes.  My frequent co-worker was a girl named April, who I recently relocated on Facebook.

 Cleaning. That was something I really detested: we had to clean up completely, utterly spotless to the manager’s satisfaction, and couldn’t leave until then (those of you who have worked in the food industry know what I’m talking about).  My prior jobs had been office jobs where you leave at closing time with no fuss or bother.  This could have been avoided by taking a non-closing shift, but my only free hours – with classes – were in the evening. 

I ended up quitting after six weeks as the money was minimum wage and not worth the long hours and bullshit.  It wasn’t so much poor treatment by management – most of the managers were fairly cool and laid back (except for one dick who always made me mop up whenever the customers were gone), and some of the assistant managers were fellow students.  Mostly it was the work itself I didn’t like and this business of being kept an hour after closing to clean up.

 Trak Auto.  In 1995 or so I was working as a very poorly paid attorney, still waiting for – and not getting – a long-promised raise from my boss, a sole practitioner by the name of Jerry.  So I took this part time job, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and the noon-to-closing shift on Saturday, at the Track Auto in downtown Falls Church, on Broad Street, across from Don Beyer Volvo.  Later it turned into an Advance Auto Parts, but this location was swallowed up by the Staples next door.

 Initially I was a cashier, then later did some work at the parts counter.  This was back when Trak Auto employees wore the white button down shirts which were pretty sharp – even with epaulets.  Years later they switched to the more casual dark grey polo shirts.  I was frequently recommended for management, but managers had to put in at least 32 hours per week (not compatible with a full time job as an attorney) and got a fairly low salary considering their high responsibilities – not a good combination.  Plus the company didn’t seem to treat even its valued employees very well.

 Trak Auto cashiers were just that: cashiers.  They didn’t have to know anything about cars, and frequently knew far less than many of the customers.  Most of them were teenagers or young 20-somethings with poor attitudes and work ethics, and turnover was horrendous.  With my experience at NOVA, plus having taken all of the optional parts quizzes (though I never took the ASE Parts exam) I was in a much better position than most of the cashiers, so I got the coveted parts desk position fairly often.   I did get used to the whole “closing the register” deal, counting out $75.00 cash, counting out the excess, splitting up the checks and charge slips, and putting everything in the right envelopes.  Before long I was consistently having the register close out on target.

 We frequently had customers ask us to install wiper blades and headlights, or even batteries.   Since we were only cashiers and only qualified to run a register (which for some of the guys was a challenge in and of itself), we weren’t paid or authorized to do any services on cars, no matter how simple.  I’m sure the customers felt stupid paying a mechanic $20-50 to do something that simple, and at the same time embarrassed (particularly male customers) that they couldn’t manage to do it themselves.  As a practical matter we would do some of these things, free of charge, on rare occasions if the store was dead quiet – and if the customer was nice enough and appeared to recognize that this was an accommodation on our part and not part of our job description.  Of course, if the customer was a particularly attractive female, that would also be a bargaining point.

 90% of our staff was male.  Occasionally we’d get female employees, or even managers, but that was rare.  An auto parts store is a man’s place, by mutual agreement of the sexes – I can’t imagine any straight guy volunteering to work at Sephora or Victoria’s Secret, for example.  I don’t think women were actively discouraged from applying: first of all, a cashier job is pretty much unskilled, so we’d hire practically anyone, and with our turnover we almost always could use more help.  Second, as male-dominated as the stores were, we’d gladly welcome any female presence to make the job more interesting.  It’s just not the kind of place the average female employee would want to work.  On the other hand, if she was looking to find a guy, this was probably an excellent job to have, both in terms of her co-workers and the heavily male proportion of customers.

 Eventually Jerry was embarrassed explaining to clients why his associate was leaving the office at 4 p.m. in a white Trak Auto shirt, so he gave me a raise which let me quit the Tuesday and Thursday shift.  I kept the Saturday shift until November 2000, when I got a reasonably well paying job at a firm in Woodbridge.  Around December 2001, unemployed again, I took a parts counter job at the Super Trak Warehouse in Sterling, which I held onto until about April 2002, yet again finding the atrociously low wages were not worth the long hours.  Shortly after that I ended up at the current office, Saigon Central.

 I would say I learned alot at Trak Auto, mostly from my fellow workers. I still stay in touch with Ed, who turned out to be a great friend, and frequently run into some of the others at various Advance Auto Parts.  I had a 10% employee discount, which came in handy for lots of auto parts and Mobil One.  For what was supposed to be simply a part-time job to earn some extra money, it was a surprisingly positive and useful experience.

 Domino’s.  I must have worked this job for a week at most.  For all the work driving around, finding someone’s house number on a curb in total darkness, for a modest tip, it was really not worth the bother.  It didn’t help that the branch I was working at was fully staffed already and sent me home after only an hour or two a night.  I’m not Fry – count me out of the delivery business.

 Next up will be an analysis of post college office jobs – outside the legal industry.  Stay tuned!

Black Book trailer

The trailer for the second of the two films - again, some small taste of what it's all about.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution Trailer

The trailer for the first of the two films I mentioned - gives some (!) idea of the drama and eroticism of this film.

Black Book vs. Lust: Caution

Time for more movie comparisons.  This time, two WWII films involving lust, passion, and betrayal. 

 Lust: Caution.  During WWII, a bunch of Chinese theater troupe students decide, in the midst of the Japanese occupation, to take on Yee, the Chinese chief of security.  A girl, Wong (very cute) befriends Yee, ostensibly to spy on him and report back to the resistance on his plans, yet ends up in a love affair with him; quite cynically, her superiors and peers instruct her to get intimate with him if necessary, a plan she obeys with considerable reluctance.  Eventually the intimacy reaches the point where we’re no longer sure if she’s still loyal to her group and mission, or whether she has switched sides out of loyalty to her lover.  Remarkable!   Plenty of nudity and soft-core sex (and the woman appears to be genuinely aroused).  Very sexy, very well done.

 Black Book.  This is possibly, bar none, the most cynical WWII movie I’ve ever seen, far more than “Kelly’s Heroes”, which was more stupid than clever.  It’s in Dutch with subtitles and has no one famous (at least not that experienced US audiences would recognize).  It’s done by Paul Verhoeven, Mr. Robocop. 

Some Dutch woman, Ellis de Vries, Jewish, has to infiltrate the top SS installation in that part of Holland.  Remarkably, it’s April 1945 and somehow this area is still in German hands while Berlin is basically Russian territory, and Adolf Hitler is just days from blowing his brains out.  The SS commander, Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Muntze, quickly determines that Ellis is Jewish and figures out she’s a spy.  But he likes her so much that he doesn’t blow the whistle on her [actually, it’s debatable whether Yee was “on to” Wong all along, or whether he only found out later; I suppose the viewer will have to make that call, as I couldn’t].  In fact, he turns out to be the most sympathetic character of the whole film.  Even the Dutch resistance fighters turn out to be (A) anti-Semitic, (B) cynical, (C) not above dealing with the Nazis themselves when it’s in their best interests.  One by one, several different mysteries are solved and who we thought of as heroes turn out to be far less so – how cynical do you have to be, that an SS officer is the HERO of the film.  It’s entertaining for these twists alone.  Also, there is lots of violence and lots of sex too.  So it’s a juicy film.

 As a bonus, I strongly recommend the following movie, not because of sex (which is fairly sparse in the film) but the overall plot and ultimate outcome are far more redeeming than those of either prior film:

 The Lives of Others.  The SS Captain from “The Black Book” returns as an East German playright, George Dreyman, in East Berlin in 1984 (shortly before Gorbachev took office and Glasnost/Perestroika came around).  He’s been assigned for surveillance by Stasi’s top interrogator, Wiesler (who teaches a class on interrogation techniques at the Stasi training academy).  As it happens, Wiesler grows fond of the playright and his actress girlfriend, whose lives he lives vicariously by eavesdropping on them.  As he grows fonder of them, he grows considerably less fond of his superior, Grubitz (some careerist asshole played by a German dead ringer for Jeffrey Jones, who plays all those jerks in movies, notably the truant officer in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) and the culture minister, a fat, arrogant Hermann Goring lookalike who blackmails the girlfriend into an affair with him and almost ruins her relationship with Dreyman.  The ending?  Well, you’ll just have to see it for yourself, but I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Rommel

“We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”  Winston Churchill

 Erwin Rommel (born November 15, 1891, died October 14, 1944) was probably the most skilled German commander of World War II and the most respected by the Allies.  He wrote two books: Attacks (1937) chronicling his exploits in WWI and released shortly before WWII; and The Rommel Papers, which were actually collected after his death and published at that time, although he was actually writing much of the material with a view to publishing them after the war as a sequel to his first book.  The second book also compiles his letters to his wife written contemporaneously, as they complement his battle reports.

 Attacks

France Part I (1914).  This was the early (August-September) warfare when it was still fairly dynamic, with the Germans still in pickelhaubes (spiked helmets) and the French still in dark blue coats, kepis, and their famous red pants.  This was Rommel’s first experience as an infantry officer, but he certainly learns quickly.  The French fight inconsistently: sometimes surrendering quickly, other times putting up a fight.  His narrative is peppered with tactical maps – very detailed and very clear – and periodic theoretical conclusions drawn from his experiences (“this is what I learned – the hard way”).

 France Part II (late 1914, early 1915).  By now the war had turned into trenches, but still spiked helmets and red pants.  The French still don’t impress him very much, and still fight somewhat inconsistently.

 Romania (1916).  Off into the mountains with the Wurttemburg Mountain Battalion.  Although frequently outnumbered substantially, he tends to lead his troops to victory consistently.  The Romanians fight better than the French (some French officers lead them) but are really no match for German soldiers.  He does not mention any trips to Bucharest, though I know the Germans walked into the capital city after decisively defeating the Romanian Army. 

 Italy (1917).  Into the mountains of Italy on the Isonzo Front.  This has been the site of countless battles with heavy casualties on both sides yet neither able to achieve any tactical or strategic victory, resulting in simply lots of dead, frozen bodies and a frustrating stalemate – until Rommel showed up. Here he really did some spectacular magic, really pulling a major Sgt. York.  His unit darted from mountain top to mountain top, tricking various Italian units – full strength and greatly outnumbering his own – into surrendering without a fight.  The Italian officers cursed at him for his Ulysses-style trickery, but it was too late.  He practically won the mountain war singlehandedly, resulting in his Pour Le Merite (aka “Blue Max”), Germany’s highest decoration.

 The Rommel Papers.

France (May-June 1940).  As commander of the 7^th Panzer Division, he led his unit across France in 3 phases.  First was the crossing of the Meuse – a real nailbiting, touch-and-go affair, France’s best chance and hope to stop the blitzkrieg in its tracks, spectacularly blown, of course – ending with the arrival on the coast, cutting off the Allied forces and most of the BEF, which led to the evacuation at Dunkirk.  Then was a second offensive over the Somme, pretty much against leftover French units which mostly disintegrated without much of a fight.  This ended at St-Valery. Third was the offensive further west up to Cherbourg with the capture of that port.  By this point the Armistice had been signed, but there was still some fighting going on.  The British make a few appearances during this phase and consistently fight well.

            Interesting:  very early on he came to the conclusion that the best tactic was not to find some cover, pick a target, and shoot carefully; rather, it was to charge forward, guns blazing in the enemy’s general direction.  Although the firepower appears indiscriminately applied, in practice it forces the enemy to keep their heads down and they will ultimately be smashed by the infantry/armor forces when they do reach the enemy lines.

            Little understood is the fact that the German panzer divisions were mostly outclassed by their opponents.  A substantial portion of the German tanks were Mark I and II models with machine guns and 20mm cannon respectively, originally intended as nothing more than practice tanks to learn tactics in maneuvers, and never intended to actually go up against enemy armor in combat.  Even the Mark III and IV tanks, which were a minority, were only barely a match for the French tanks.  The Czech tanks the Germans used were apparently in between.  The 37mm anti-tank gun commonly used was practically worthless, though even at this early stage the Germans were using the dreaded “88” in an anti-tank role.  Fortunately they had complete air superiority, which worked in their favor.  Where the Germans truly shined and defeated the Allies was by (A) putting radios in all the tanks, and (B) concentrating them into armored divisions instead of spreading them out piecemeal in support of infantry units.  Unfortunately for the Germans, their enemies soon learned from them and turned this around – as Rommel found in his next “adventure” in North Africa. 

 North Africa.  Rommel finally meets his match against the British 8^th Army.  He started off in Libya in April 1941, took Benghazi, surrounded Tobruk, and gave the 8^th Army a bloody nose with no more than 2 Panzer divisions and 2-3 Italian motorized divisions - most of the Italian Army in North Africa was non-motorized, which Rommel found to be practically useless in modern war; he found it best to simply employ them in static defense, allowing troops who might otherwise be tied down in that capacity to be freed for mobile warfare.  Many of his tanks were Mark I and II models, his III’s and IV’s had short barrels (before finally getting some long-barrelled Panzer IVs), whereas the British got Matilda II’s, some Crusaders, and much to Rommel’s distaste, the Grant tank from the US.  He only got a few Tiger tanks in Tunisia, but even these were wasted by von Arnim.  In fact, most of his best supplies only came in when he was trapped in Tunisia, i.e. when they were too late to have any strategic impact on the campaign.

            After stunning successes in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) by October 1942 the Afrika Korps had reached Egypt and El Alamein, and was threatening to break forth into the Middle East.  By this point, however, London – unlike Berlin – realized how important this front was, and began throwing in far more tanks and troops, and achieved air superiority.  Moreover, Berlin & Rome had essentially cut off Rommel on supplies and petrol – whatever such supplies could make it to him running the gauntlet of the Royal Navy.   Whereas the British could afford to throw in fresh troops and rotate their forces, Rommel had the same two Panzer divisions he started out with and almost no replenishment.  

            At El Alamein, Rommel was decisively pushed back, and unable to retake the offensive.  It took all his skill and intelligence to keep his army intact as it retreated from Egypt, across Libya – passing all the territory which he and his men had fought so hard to take over the previous months – and eventually winding up in Tunisia, trapped between Montgomery and Eisenhower.  He was recalled to Berlin before the end, which was the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia, instead of their rescue and transport to Italy, in March 1943. 

            Throughout the battles in North Africa, from April 1941 to March 1943, Rommel persistently fought as much against his superiors in Rome and Berlin as against the British.  From June 1941 onwards, the Russian Front drew the majority of Berlin’s attention, with North Africa considered a losing front.  To the contrary, according to Rommel, this was a front with enormous strategic potential.  The Middle East was very lightly defended, yet rich in oil.  With a few more divisions, he could break through the British lines in Egypt, take the Middle East (mainly Iraq and Persia/Iran), and even loop up to the Caucasus and steal the Russians’ oil fields there.  In one fell swoop he could solve Germany’s oil issues AND assure a strategic victory on the Eastern Front.  But he couldn’t convince anyone in Berlin of this idea.

 The Italians.  More of a liability than an asset.  Their tanks were so small, underarmed, underarmored, and underpowered, that the soldiers called them “self-propelled coffins”.  Their Navy was totally outclassed by the Royal Navy and did a poor job of protecting the Mediterranean supply lines.  The soldiers themselves rarely fought well unless led by German officers.  Rommel notes that the Italian officers mistreated their troops, refused to fraternize with them, and many Italian generals expressed outright hostility to the Germans. And as noted earlier, most of the infantry was non-motorized, which made them of little value in this war; the troops were consistently poorly-equipped.  Obviously the Italians were way behind in putting forth a military which could fight competitively in a modern, mobile war.  Rommel does note, though, that in certain limited circumstances, Italian soldiers did fight well, but overall the odds were stacked against them, so a fair analysis of the Italian soldier’s fighting skill is difficult to make. 

            Aside from Mussolini and Hitler themselves, the Germans and Italians never seemed to get along very well during the war.  The Italians thought the Germans were arrogant and stuck up, while the Germans did in fact look down on the Italians as incompetent clowns.  The Italians were always the weak point, and their collapse at El Alamein meant the entire side had to give in – similar to the buckling of the Romanian and Hungarian flanks protecting the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad, resulting in that army’s encirclement and defeat.

 The British 8^th Army.  Here Rommel finally found a worthy opponent.  Whether it was the tenacious Tommies on the ground, or their equally steel-nerved officers, the Brits gave Rommel a very hard time.  This was finally an opponent he would have to literally smash to pieces, they would NOT be frightened, bluffed, or tricked into retreat or captivity.  Montgomery, himself, however, was not particularly impressive as a commander.  By the time he arrived on the scene, at El Alamein, the British had overwhelming superiority in manpower, tanks, artillery, and above all, complete air superiority.  Montgomery was overly cautious and only attacked when he was 100% certain of success; the most which can be said for him is that he capably managed the drive from El Alamein to Tunisia given a militarily superior force.

 Italy.  After being recalled, shortly before the Axis forces capitulated in Tunisia – 120,000 veteran German troops Rommel felt could have been used elsewhere, a horrendous waste – Rommel was loosely involved with the Italian dilemma.  Mussolini had been captured, and the top Italian brass was trying to weasel out a peace with the Allies.  The Germans wanted to pour men into Italy and had to dicker around with all sorts of political bullshit.  Rommel never ended up in command of any forces there; Kesselring was given that job.

 Normandy.  Instead, they put Rommel in charge of developing the Atlantic Wall, Germany’s ambitious attempt to close off the coast of Europe to an Allied invasion they knew would be coming – not if, but when…and where.  This uncertainty meant that huge stretches of coastline, along the Atlantic, the English Channel, up near Calais, and even along the Belgian and Dutch coasts, had to be fortified somehow, and lots of valuable manpower spread throughout France.  They focused most of the attention near Calais, which is the closest point between France and England, but as this was also the most obvious landing point, it made it that much less likely the Allies would land there.  The major issue was the debate on how best to stop the invasion.  Rommel was convinced that it had to be stopped on the beaches.  Give the enemy enough of a beachhead and he will land a huge army and be impossible to stop.  His superiors, including Hitler, were convinced of the opposite: forces had to be held back, away from the coast, because they didn’t know where the landing would take place, and couldn’t commit forces to any sector until it was clear that was the Allies’ target.  With an absolute inferiority of air cover, bringing forces to the landing area from somewhere else was a difficult, if not impossible task.  The Allies would mercilessly bomb any forces coming up in any appreciable strength, including bombing rail lines and roads going through towns.  At this point the Germans were the only country on Earth with any sort of superhighway system (the Autobahn – Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway system, inspired by his impression of Germany’s Autobahn, wasn’t to arrive until the 1950s) so all the French had were two lane roads all of which went through, not around, any major cities with no bypasses.  In addition to this logistical issue, there was also the persistent shortage of petrol.  Ultimately all movement had to take place at night to avoid Allied air attacks.  Finally, Rommel was not given any command authority to move forces around – Hitler had to OK any such orders – so even if, by some miracle, he could figure out who needed to go where and could manage to actually send them there, he still needed permission from Berlin to do anything.  The ultimate irony in all this was that, collectively in France the Germans had enough men and tanks to throw the Allies back into the sea, but there was no way to gather them all together in Normandy at the right time to do so.

 The Desert Fox.  This is the 1951 film with James Mason as Rommel.  It’s based on a book by a British general who wanted to get to the bottom of Rommel’s mysterious death in 1944.  There is some coverage of the war in Africa and his work building the Atlantic Wall, and his frustration at not being able to adequately defend against the Normandy invasion once it was underway.  But it focuses primarily on the circumstances behind his fall from favor with Hitler and his implication in the Stauffenberg plot (as seen in the movie “Valkyrie” with Tom Cruise).   The movie paints Rommel as completely at odds with the conspiracy and nowhere close to any involvement beyond associating with the mayor of Stuttgart, Strolin – and even there he told Strolin he wanted no part in the plot. 

 His own papers were likewise edited by himself and his staff, as best they could, to remove any incriminating evidence – for obvious reasons.  What survives in the Rommel Papers are various entries which show the following:

1.  Hitler was aware, in 1943, that the war was going to be lost, and shared this candid assessment with Rommel.  At this point he was still somewhat clearheaded and had not yet degenerated into delusional madness.

2.  Later on, Hitler developed a perverse conviction that if the war would be lost, he would see to it that Germany would be destroyed in the process.

3.  A separate peace with the Allies would be desirable.  This would allow the Germans to send their Western armies eastward and give them a fighting chance of defeating the Russians.  There was some speculation on Rommel’s part that the Allies were sufficiently at odds with Stalin that they would even consider a separate peace with Germany, for precisely this reason.  But in any case, this required successful defeat of the Normandy invasion.  Once the invasion was successful, the Allies were no longer inclined to accept any sort of conditional surrender.

4.  For his part, Rommel had phenomenal admiration for the US.  Not only did the Americans quickly grasp and learn mobile warfare, they were stunning at logistics and supply.  Here was an enemy which could easily outproduce the Germans by several orders of magnitude AND were well capable of taking full advantage of these material advantages.  As far as he was concerned, so long as the Americans were involved in the war against them, defeat was a foregone conclusion. 

5.  By contrast, the Russians were brutal.  Soviet military doctrine appeared to be: overwhelm the opponent by sheer weight of numbers of tanks, artillery, and manpower.  The Soviets had an almost inexhaustible supply of men and no reservations about feeding them into the meat grinder. 

6.  Hitler spoke of his “special, secret weapons” (jet fighters, V1 and V2 rockets – but absolutely no mention of any nuclear weapons) but Rommel considered these to be nonsense.  Any such weapons, to the extent they had any, were too few to make a difference and their only substantial role was to act as a form of false hope to boost the morale of the soldiers.

 The End.  In October 1944, implicated in the plot to kill Hitler, Rommel was blackmailed into committing suicide.  He was Germany’s biggest hero and most famous general, so the publicity associated with a public trial would be unthinkable.  The Nazis threatened to torture and murder his widow and son Manfred if he insisted on a trial – which would end up in his conviction anyway – so he had no choice but to take poison.  His son Manfred notes, in the Rommel diaries, the bitter anger he felt reading the “heartfelt condolences” sent to him and his mother by Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels regarding Rommel’s death – by those who were fully aware of the circumstances thereof. 

 Strategy.  From the very beginning in 1914 to his last active command in Tunisia in 1943, Rommel was always a very audacious and bold commander.  He notes that his fellow generals accused him of being reckless and gambling, but he counters in the following manner: “I always had a backup plan, some idea of what I was going to do if my plan didn’t work as I expected – I left myself a way out.  For this reason, I was not really gambling in the true sense of the word.”  In WWII he had the benefit of mobile forces and the knowledge on how to use them. His opponents in France in 1940 couldn’t really grasp the principles of mobile warfare, but by North Africa he finally ran up against opponents who could, particularly the Americans, who learned quickly – too quickly.  His audacity was successful because he understood exactly how much he could get away with, he understood the limitations of his forces, a subtle advantage which his academic, staff-bound colleagues back in Berlin could not really grasp either.  His papers in WWII frequently express distaste for these armchair officers and generals who never visit the front, and who in turn look down on field officers with mud on their boots and dust on their uniforms.  Another problem he had was, once he developed a reputation for skillfully defeating a numerically superior enemy using only a skeleton army, his superiors expected him to produce results consistently without having anything more supplied to him – “I’m a victim of my own reputation.”   Once he ran up against an enemy which could actually exploit its military superiority – as he found by El Alamein – defeat was inevitable so long as no further supplies or reinforcements would be provided. 

 Reading his WWII papers gives fresh thought for various “what if” scenarios so popular in alternate history books, not the least of which are Rommel’s plans for conquest of the Middle East and the possible outcome of a successful Normandy defense, a separate peace with the Allies, and subsequent revitalization of the German effort against the Soviets.