191: Desert Fox: The Storied Military Career of Erwin Rommel by Dr Samuel Mitcham

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Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show. My name is Gary Pinkerton and I co host this show with Jason Hartman. This is Heroic Investing, episode 191. My guest today is Dr. Samuel Mitchum. Dr. Mitchum was born in 1949 in Louisiana and still lives there with his wife. He is a US army veteran. He was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and after the Vietnam War he held a couple of jobs, as he mentions at the beginning of our discussion, and then found that he had a passion for and a niche for writing amazing historical books. He's a historian. He's a prolific author of over 40 books. Most of his writings are centered on World War II, on Hitler's army, and specifically General Rommel. And most of you probably know General Rommel better as the Desert Fox. He's written several books about General General Rommel and his conquests, his successes in battle, and actually how he led to the fall of Hitler himself. He also has written a few books, very well received books on the U.S. civil War, battle of Vicksburg, and specifically, and most importantly, he is focused in on General Nathan Bedford Forrest. General Forrest is quite a character and I'm sure he comes to life even as a bigger than life character in Dr. Mitchum's books. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Samuel Mitchum. So Dr. Mitchum, after returning from your army service, you held a few jobs and then you decided to become an author. So how did you make that transition? Could you walk us through how it came about that you're now an author?

Kind of had to. It was a good job that I had, but it was a dead end job and without a doctorate, going nowhere. In the meantime, I decided to write a book while I was working at the Institute. The way it worked, we had major projects and in between the major projects, we lived on the overhead from the previous project. Well, we came to the end of a project, my boss badly underbid it and there was no overhead at the end of it. So she told me that she wanted me for the next project but couldn't pay me for three to six months. And if I got another job, she would understand. I said no. Lorraine, all these years I have wanted to write a book and I paid in unemployment. I was single. So I decided to spend at least three months writing a book. And that's all I did for three months. All the result was a book on Field Marshal Rommel, the Desert fox. It was 920 typewritten pages, manual typewriter, no self correcting feature. Kill me if I had to do it today. We sold it to Macmillan and I got half of my advance, which was sizable for somebody fresh out of grad school back in the late 70s. Then a corporate conglomerate bought Macmillan. My editor got the corporate act. So I had to find a new publisher and I tried for over a year. I sent it to a small house up in Massachusetts and they sent me back a letter of rejection. I wish I'd kept it. It told me what it needed to do. It said, gee, we'd like to publish it. This too damn big. Their exact words.

So I broke it into three books. Two campaign books on North Africa and one on Normandy. Those were the first three books I ever published. Have a distinction of publishing my first book twice or selling it twice. Now I've come back to where I started. I've made the full circle. Regner history wanted me to write a book on the Desert Fox. I told my publisher about my initial effort and of course a lot of information has come down since the late 1970s. So I did the biography of Rommel. It was fun. Real pleased that it worked out as well as it did.

That's awesome. I appreciate you taking us kind of walking us through that. I'm not sure you covered this, but your time in the military, you were active duty army colonel and helicopter pilot by trade, right? And this was during the Vietnam War. I think you touched on it, but it was a ways back in the conversation there.

Yeah, well, I touched on it. I was lieutenant back on active duty. I stayed active in the reserve, did a few stints of temporary duty on active duty, but basically I was a reserve officer when I made my rank. I didn't want to spend my whole life in the military. I was glad to be able to serve three years. Yeah, I was glad to serve my country. Flying was fun. Flying helicopters is fun.

I'm sure it is. It's challenging, no doubt.

Well, there are a couple of moments to start terror, but mostly I really enjoyed it.

So 40 books later, you've been through many campaigns of World War II. You did a voyage into a specific look at Nathan Bedford Forest and a couple of the battles there of the Civil War. And you're back, as you said, full circle back to the Desert Fox. So tell us about how you turned the 900 page book into, I'm assuming something a little bit smaller, a little condensed. How'd that journey go?

Well, I left out a lot of the details of the battles used in my campaign books. And my initial book found some more personal anecdotes about his life. Especially interesting to American audiences may be the fact that he had an illegitimate daughter, which I didn't know about. Nobody else did either speak of back when I wrote my first book. He acknowledged the 21st century. When his daughter died. She was an old lady by then. The letters that he had sent to her during the war came to light. I initially didn't believe it, but had checked some German sources and sure enough turned out to be true. He was an officer cadet, what they call a filing on 18 years old. Away from home for the first time. He was lonely and he had an affair with a young lady who was a fruit seller. She sold fruit and to his shock and amazement, she turned up pregnant. Well, though, I mean, Germany was very much a class conscious society. You had to have your commanding officer's permission to get married. And this lady was not at all considered officer class material. So Rommel faced a choice. Do the right thing and marry her or resign from the army. And this was 1913. He decided to marry her. Well, his father set him down. His dad died later that same year. But he said, if you resign now, everyone will think you are a coward because World War I started in 1914. And everybody would think that Rommel resigned because he was afraid to go to war. Well, that was totally unthinkable to Rommel. So he broke off the relationship a year later, ended up on the Western Front.

Yeah, that's certainly something that hasn't come to light until your. Well, I guess in print, until your book. You know, as I'm reading here online, some of the takeaways from your book or some of the excerpts, it's really compelling and it's certainly all of these are things that I have not taken the time to assemble in my own mind. I'm not a huge historian, but I've certainly studied the war and certainly have studied the Desert Fox. So just some quick little excerpts here. You know, you talk about Rommel burning the orders, telling him to commit war crimes, his impact on D Day landings, and then his involvement in the plot to overthrow Hitler and then committing suicide after all of that falls apart. I knew of some of those, but those are definitely four big enough hooks to get me to read this book in the near future. Anything else to talk about? I mean, that's just a great book and a great story.

One thing I think a reader would be struck by was Rommel's incredible versatility as an officer. He started out in the infantry branch, in fact, and then he went to the Mountain Branch. 1918, he really distinguished himself. Battle of Matajar. He commanded about 800 men. He captured 9,000 Italians and 81 guns. And then at Langhorne, a few days later, he captured another 10,000 enemy soldiers. That's 19,000 Allied prisoners in a few days. And he had probably 800 men or less. He then, of course, went into the Reichsphere, as the army of the middle period was called. It was between the Second Reich and Third Reich and called the Weimar Republic. And his progress as Germany was limited to 100,000 man army. And anytime you're in a small army like that, your rate of promotion is almost always very slow. He spent 14 years as a captain and finally became an instructor. And he wrote a book. And this was a real turning point in his career, in his life. It's called infantry and the Attack, and it was based on his lectures and his war experiences. And it became a bestseller in Nazi Germany. And Adolf Hitler read it and decided he wanted to meet the author. So he made Rommel acting commander of the Fuhrer bodyguard battalion during the occupation of the Sudetenland, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Memel. And then also in the Polish campaign of 1939. Now, Rommel probably never saw the inside of a tank before about 1938, but he nevertheless saw that the armored branch, the mechanized motorized infantry, was the wave of the future, not the infantry of the cavalry. So he went in to see Hitler after the campaign, and Hitler took a personal interest in him at that point.

What year was this again?

1939.

39. Okay.

Yeah. And he said, mein Fuhrer, I would like a command. Hitler said, what do you want? And Rommel said, without batting an eye, command of a Panzer division. He later admitted to his chief of staff, this was an extremely immodest request on my part because there were literally hundreds of officers better qualified for such a command than he was. But Hitler gave him command of the 7th Panzer Division. It didn't have a good reputation at about 10,000 men. And its tanks were predominantly captured Czech vehicles. They weren't the Tigers and the Panthers that the Americans met in Normandy in 1940. Four, they were inferior to the French tanks, except for the fact they had radios with these 10,000 men, 200 tanks. Rommel destroyed more enemy tanks than he had, and he captured over 97,000 prisoners, including five admirals. He overran the French Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Cherbourg. And. Yeah, and this propelled him forward, you know, tremendously. It was obvious he was a master of it, even though he hadn't the experience and the training of some of the other officers. Then Hitler sent him to North Africa, and he excelled. As commander of the Afrika Corps, he was often outnumbered three to one. And the tanks in the desert were not Germany's best. And Germany really wasn't ready to fight a war in North Africa. They didn't intend to. What happened? The Italian Empire invaded Egypt, and The British, with 32,000 men, destroyed the Italian army and took over 130,000 of them prisoner. And there was really nothing to keep them from going to Tripoli and finishing off Mussolini's North African empire, except the Germans had invaded Greece. Now, Thiel Marshall Wal, the British commander, wanted to finish them off, but Churchill said, no, that can wait. Let's save Greece. Well, they weren't able to save Greece, and that turned into a disaster. And the cost of it was the Germans had a chance to bolster up Mussolini's North African empire. And Hitler got this one right. He said, the loss of North Africa can be withstood from a military point of view, but it would also free up a dozen British divisions which they could use most dangerously. So he sent two divisions to North Africa and Dave Rommel in commander of the Afrika Korps, and he later expanded that mission, but it was strictly a secondary theater of operations the whole time.

Wow. So, as you've studied, obviously numerous wars, what would you distill down as characteristics of the successful individuals that you've written about? Several generals and obviously campaign experts.

Audacity. People like Robert E. Lee, Bedford Forrest, Ervin Rommel, that guts. I mean, they took some serious risk, granted. Vicksburg, another example. Grant basically put himself in a position where if he lost battle, there would be no retreat.

Yeah. He would die with his entire army. Yeah.

And Rommel wasn't afraid to take that kind of risk either. Obviously, Lee and Forrest weren't. And, yeah, I would say audacity also maneuver. All of these men I've studied were masters of it. They were often outnumbered. Lee was always outnumbered. But at the decisive point, he always had more men present there than his enemy did. General Forrest said, ask him a reason for his Success. He said, I get there first with the most men.

Yeah.

And studied Forrest and he said, what difference does it make if the British had more men? I always had more men at the decisive point with my little arms. And he did so. Yeah, those are your things.

That I.

Think sums it up very well. If we take just a quick moment and talk about maybe one of your most well known ones, bust hell wide open your story and historical look at General Forrest. What are some things in there that perhaps someone who has not yet read it would not know?

I gotta quote General Sherman on that. He said Nathan Bedford Forrest was the most interesting man to ever fight in the American Civil War. He also called him the best cavalryman in American history. He was Enigma, uniquely American personage. He, he was a first grade dropout. Never did learn to read and write correctly. Once said he never looked at a pen. But what he didn't think of a snake. He grew up in abject poverty. Their house was 960 square feet. You could look through cracks between the logs, see outside and there were 10 of them in it.

He was head of household at like age 15, right? Or something like that.

Yeah. His dad died and he became head of the household, head of the family. And yet before the Civil War started, he admitted that he was worth one and a half million dollars. That's 34 million dollars today. But I think he was low balling it looking at some of the accounts. He had a stage coach operation, a mail contract brick factory. He traded cattle and horses, mules and people. And he was a land speculator, owned a number of plantations. He was worth more than that. So when the war started, he enlisted as a private. And by the end of the war he had risen to the rank of lieutenant general and be three stars in today's army. The only one in the Civil War to do so. And during the process he personally killed 30 Yankees in one on one combat. He was a very big man. He was a little over 6ft tall. At a time when the average man was in the Union army was 5 foot 7 inches. He weighed about 210 pounds. The average man was in the Yankee army was 143 pounds. Confederate army couldn't have been much different. And he enjoyed combat. Now General Patton loved war. Well, Forrest hated war. But he got a thrill of the actual. In fact, he put a advertisement in the Memphis peel trying to recruit troops. He said, come on boys, let's have some fun and kill some Yankees. Well he meant that.

That was genuine. Huh? Not hard to believe knowing What I do of this man's history, he's. He was certainly an interesting character. An enigma, I think you said.

Oh, he had no fear, hardly. One time, the first man he killed, it was a gunfight. There were four gunfighters coming to kill his uncle. He said he wasn't going to let him do it. They drew on him and he had a two shot pistol. He killed one, crippled another, and there he was, no time to reload. A friend tossed him a bowie knife, so he charged, slashed one of them. He was critically wounded and lost an arm. And fourth one ran away. Forrest ran him down, put his knife to his throat and said that he wasn't going to kill him because he was too much of a man to kill someone so totally under his control. But the gunfighter must always remember that he let him go.

Yeah.

And Forrest also killed two confederates. They ran away. And that's a bad idea when Forrest's your commander. And he often killed a wife beater. Well, he didn't drink, didn't smoke, he gambled. He was a great gambler and he put women on a pedestal. He had great respect for him. He fired one of his best friends for having sex with a woman outside of marriage. He said, I will not have in my army any man who would do that to a woman.

Wow.

He wasn't what I initially expected when I started researching Complex Character.

Why did you choose to write about General Forrest?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, I grew up in a household. Well, I like to say that I was 12 years old before I found out Robert E. Lee was not part of the Trinity.

I came across a newspaper interview Lee gave after the war, and the reporter asked him who was the best general in the American Civil War. And we responded. As a man I have never met. His name is Forrest. They never would meet. And I read a couple of books on him. And he told about his meeting with his wife, and that was the second reason. He proposed to her on their third meeting. She accepted on the fourth, but she was very much different from him. And Forrest had to get her daddy's permission. You had to do that in those days. Her daddy was dead, so he had to go to the Guardian, her uncle, Reverend Cowan, who was not at all excited about having Nathan Bedford Forrest in the family. So they argued about it a while. And finally the reverend said, why do you want to marry her? She's quiet, well educated, demure, introverted Christian girl. You fight, you have gunfights, you curse, you're an extrovert, you're Not a Christian. And she is. Why do you want to marry her? She's nothing like you. And Forrest responded with, I don't want to marry anybody like me. I want to marry a Christian girl. Well, I can identify with that. I went through a he's in period.

So someone who makes him better or just different from him?

Both, I think. Both. I had a great deal of respect for. I married a Christian woman. I have no regrets. We've been together 31 years and Forrest was a one woman man. That was it. He married her and even though he was not a Christian, he didn't convert full late in life. She worked on him a long time. Yeah, I could identify with that.

That's awesome. Well, I appreciate, I appreciate you explaining that for the audience. Dr. Mitchum, as we come up near the end here, certainly can find all of your works on Amazon and anywhere you can find books nowadays. Do you have a website or a mailing list or something that you would point the audience towards?

Oh, no. Regner History, I guess, has Desert Fox on it and busted wide open. Amazon.com Barnes and Noble carries the books. I don't know if the one in Utah has it or not.

Good.

But they're available.

They're available. Sure, sure. So thinking of our audience being first responders, active duty members of the military, and veterans interested in starting their own business or in real estate or just learning more about transition from the military. Any advice that comes to mind that you want to pass on?

Don't shoot anybody. No.

Can'T do that anymore. I got out of the army and it wasn't a hard transition for me. Different people have different levels of difficulty. I was just kind of glad to be home and alive. And that's why I went back to grad school. I got out of the army and said, gosh, the war is over. I'm still alive. What do I do now?

Well, I went back, got a master's.

That's something to cherish, I guess. You know, it's certainly something to be thankful, gracious or have some gratitude towards, but also, you know, seeking what you knew was a passion and actually going after, you know, having the, having the guts to step away from a salary, income and when you had an opportunity and it looked like that was drying up to go after, you know, take charge and go after the thing that you had passion about, which was writing the book. So I think that's great advice to just about anyone out there. I for one, am very excited to get Desert Fox and dig into that book. I love World War II history, but certainly learning about General Rommel.

Well, I'm glad and I hope you enjoy it. Maybe we can do another interview at your convenience. One thing I would leave the reader with, the potential student of this, the one leading the army, like you were talking about, or the military service. Rather interesting quote. If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.

Yeah.

And I've done it. I could have made more money in something else, I'm sure, but. But I have enjoyed it. It's been a good ride. I really feel sorry for people who have jobs that say, hey, yeah, me too.

And our body speaks to us every day about whether or not we're in the right role. Right. Like, if I took the initiative to type 900 pages on a typewriter or even on a new word processing system, I would get the message quickly. I'm not in my right role. So I do think I am thankful that there are people like you who like to do the research and bring such wonderful works of art to the rest of us. Because it's not me, but I want to thank you. Yeah. Dr. Misham, thank you so much for joining our audience for a few minutes today.

Well, I sure enjoyed it. And, like, if I had to do that first book over again on a manual typewriter, probably have to hold a funeral.

It's a lot easier nowadays.

Absolutely. Well, we appreciate you taking us through that journey. Thanks so much. And we look forward to talking with you again soon.

All right. You take care of yourself.

You too, sir. Thanks.

Bye.

Bye.

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