In March 1943, the desert itself seemed to whisper his name.

Maps across Europe bore the specter of his maneuvers in arrows drawn with grease pencils. British generals spoke of him with suspicion over brandy. German newspapers turned him into a legend with a neat mustache and binoculars. In photographs, he always seemed leaning forward, as if impatient for the next attack.

In North Africa, the sand still bore the scars of the passage of their panzers.

Two years of desert warfare had made him more than a man. He was “the Desert Fox,” the commander who had humiliated British forces, driven them back time and again along the North African coast, and transformed the Sahara Desert into a battlefield of sudden thunder and vanishing footprints. He had shown the world that tanks could move like waves and that a single, decisive charge in the right place could shatter an entire front.

He had also learned to trust in one thing above all else: his own superiority.

Rommel stood by the map table in his headquarters, his gaze fixed on the thin line of the Mareth Line and the inland routes through the rocky hills of Tunisia. Cigarette smoke drifted lazily across the table, curling around the hanging lamp that bathed the map in a yellow light. Outside, the wind whistled against the tent walls, carrying with it the distant roar of engines.

The British had learned to fear him. That much was clear. They had become more careful, more methodical, slower. Rommel had seen them adapt, but always one step behind, always a little more cautious than the situation demanded. That gap—between German audacity and British prudence—was where his victories had been built.

Now there was a new element on the map.

American.

At first, they were just rumors. Reports of Operation Torch—landings in Morocco and Algeria, new faces in new uniforms, unfamiliar unit insignia—seemed like background noise. Rommel believed the real enemy was still the British Eighth Army, now under Bernard Montgomery, advancing from the east. The Americans were… apprentices. Brave, perhaps. Bloodless, certainly. Inexperienced. The kind of soldiers who made predictable mistakes.

I had read the first reports with a mild and distant interest.

“U.S. troops are poorly trained in desert warfare,” one of the intelligence summaries stated.

Inexperienced officers. Clumsy staff. Poor coordination between units.

Rommel nodded, unsurprised. Nations didn’t simply appear on the battlefield as equals. Skill took time. Germany had spent the interwar years obsessively thinking about movement and impact, about how tanks, aircraft, and radios could rewrite the rules. These Americans had spent theirs building factories and trying not to think about another European war.

Then came Kasserine.

In February 1943, Rommel’s forces attacked the US II Corps at the Kasserine Pass. The pass itself was a crevice in the Tunisian mountains, a natural funnel that turned everything into a grim and cramped theater of operations: dust, rocks, and confusion compressed between the ridges.

The Americans were not prepared.

German tanks and artillery swept through their positions like a storm through a camp. Some units scattered. Others retreated without orders. Radios crackled with panic. Trucks clogged the roads in a blind attempt to escape. Officers tried to impose order on the chaos, but were swept away by it. At one point, a German officer peered through his binoculars and remarked that the enemy’s retreat didn’t look like a tactical withdrawal at all.

It seemed like a defeat.

By the time the situation calmed down, Rommel had what he had always valued most: information. His intelligence team meticulously reviewed the captured documents and interrogated the prisoners. What they found confirmed everything he suspected. The Americans had courage—they fought fiercely in isolated pockets, some refusing to surrender even when surrounded—but courage without structure was just noise.

The verdict within their headquarters was simple: the Americans were amateurs.

Rommel allowed himself a rare, faint smile as they read the report. Brave but clumsy. Resourceful but disorganized. Someday they might become dangerous, he admitted privately, but not yet. Not there. Not now.

He turned his attention back to Montgomery and the British. He believed the next crucial test would come from there.

What he didn’t know, as he bent over his maps in Tunisia, was that somewhere to the west, in a tent lit by a single, harsh light bulb, an American officer was hunched over a very different set of documents.

George S. Patton Jr. had an open book on his field table, its pages crumpled and its margins filled with pencil marks. “Infanterie greift an” (“Infantry Attacks”) lay beside a stack of maps and reports from the German operations in North Africa. The name of the German author on the cover was one Patton knew almost as intimately as his own.

Rommel.

Patton read faster than people expected a man of his temperament to be. In public, he was all fire and volume: arrogant bearing, ivory-handled pistols, a gait that seemed as if he were attacking the ground. In private, especially at night, he could remain almost eerily still. He lived with a constant restlessness that only two things seemed to quell: battle and study.

There was no battle tonight. So he read.

Again.

He had already reviewed Rommel’s book once, months before, when North Africa was still a cartographic problem and not a place where American children lay dead on rocky hillsides. But after Kasserine, after the humiliation of watching American formations crumble under a German assault, Patton had returned to Rommel’s words with a renewed intensity that bordered on obsession.

He emphasized phrases about speed and surprise.

He circled the references to initiative, to the importance of commanders seeing the terrain firsthand, of leading from the front. He scribbled notes in the margins whenever Rommel made a decision based on intuition, on a sense of timing that seemed almost unnatural.

At another nearby table, an assistant was quietly organizing Kasserine’s reports, trying not to break the silence.

Patton had walked that battlefield. He had seen the abandoned cannons buried in the sand, the wrecked trucks, the discarded equipment. He had heard stories of officers giving contradictory orders, of units freezing up when facing German armor, of tanks being thrown into battle piecemeal without proper reconnaissance. It infuriated him. Not because the men were cowards—he knew they weren’t—but because they had been misled.

He assumed command of the II Corps with a single, burning conviction: that would never happen again.

He read Rommel because he understood a simple truth: to defeat a master of mobile warfare, one had to understand not only what he did, but also how he thought.

A young, tired, glassy-eyed staff officer watched his new commander stop in a passageway and then pick up his notebook.

“Sir?” the officer asked.

Patton didn’t look up. “Do you know why Rommel wins?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically.

“Why does he strike first?”

Patton shook his head slightly. “Because he moves faster mentally than on the ground. He’s already on your flank before you’ve even decided how to defend your front. We’re going to stop him.”

He tapped the open pages with two fingers.

“We’re going to learn how he fights,” he said. “Then we’ll apply our own methods to him.”

The transformation began the moment Patton arrived at II Corps headquarters.

The men first noticed it in a superficial and subtle way. Orders on how to wear helmets, how to tie boots, how to salute. An offensive against sloppiness that, to some, seemed like a war dress rehearsal, not the war itself. Patton inspected mess lines, latrine discipline, vehicle parking areas. He yelled when trucks were dirty. He exploded when a captain showed up without a tie.

More than one officer murmured that their new commander was an “impeccable general,” more concerned with appearances than tactics.

German intelligence, observing Patton from a distance through intercepted reports and messages, reached similar conclusions. When Rommel’s intelligence officer informed him on March 16 that the Americans had replaced his corps commander with a man who was enforcing strict rules on uniforms and salutes, Rommel smiled wryly.

“A general of the garrison,” he commented.

The desert didn’t care if your boots were polished.

But Patton’s obsession with discipline wasn’t about appearances; it was about shock. He believed that men who learned to care about the small things could be entrusted with the most important. For him, carelessness in appearance was a symptom of carelessness in thought. He wanted soldiers who reacted to fire not with panic, but with reflexes: weapons checked, positions entrenched, orders obeyed.

Behind the visible reforms, something else was happening: quieter, harder to notice, and much more important.

He reformed the work of his command’s staff. He enforced coordination between infantry, armored vehicles, artillery, and air support, which was practically nonexistent in Kasserine. He demanded speed from his units, not only in movement but also in decision-making. He instructed commanders on scenario planning, forcing them to consider chains of hypothetical situations where a German counterattack would appear not where they expected, but where they most feared it.

And he continued reading Rommel.

The map sessions turned into interrogations: “If you were Rommel, where would you attack? What route would you take? Where would you hide your anti-tank guns? What would you expect us to do and how did we disappoint that expectation?”

He played chess with a ghost on the other side of the map of Tunisia.

Rommel’s headquarters began receiving reports of American movements near a place called El Guettar.

At first glance, the situation was routine. The Americans had advanced deep into Tunisia, into more rugged terrain where valleys and hills sloped down to the desert. There were contacts, skirmishes, and tentative attacks. Nothing dramatic yet. The 10th Panzer Division prepared to teach this novice enemy another lesson.

Rommel reviewed the initial summaries with an expert eye. American units were advancing cautiously, testing the waters here, retreating there. It all seemed familiar, until the language of one of the reports made him put down the newspaper and read it again, more slowly.

Enemy defenses employed deep, concealed artillery positions. Anti-tank fire unexpectedly opened at close range against the advancing armored vehicles. Casualties were considerable before the withdrawal.

He frowned.

The description evoked tactics he himself had employed against the British. He had made an art of luring enemy tanks into carefully prepared attack zones: concealing the guns, exposing a tempting flank, letting the enemy charge, and then annihilating them at close range before pursuing them with armored vehicles. It was a choreography he knew perfectly.

Now a shocked and angry German officer was using similar phrases, except that he was the one on the receiving end.

Rommel ran his finger across the map, tracing the steep wadis and ridges around El Guettar. The terrain was ripe for ambushes. But he still struggled to grasp the sheer improbability of what he was reading.

These were Americans.

At Kasserine, their deployments had been superficial, obvious, and improvised. Their anti-tank guns had been positioned like props on a stage, in plain sight, easy to evade or destroy. Now, the officers of the 10th Panzer were talking about “well-camouflaged positions,” “coordinated fire,” and “disciplined withdrawal under fire.”

What had changed?

The answer came at the next intelligence briefing.

The new US commander, Patton, had set out—according to intelligence reports and intercepted communications—to study German operations in North Africa. He had apparently read Rommel’s pre-war writings, instructed his staff in German-style maneuvers, and spoken openly about taking the fight to the Axis quickly and aggressively.

“It is said that ‘Infantry Attacks,’” the intelligence officer noted, “is one of his favorites.”

Rommel suppressed a hint of anger.

The idea of ​​a foreign general meticulously analyzing his words, extracting principles, and then turning them against their author was… peculiar. There was professional praise in it, yes, but also a sense of violation. He had written that book as a reflection on his experiences in the First World War, as a way of codifying his understanding of small-unit tactics and initiative. It hadn’t occurred to him then that those ideas would one day help shape the mindset of an enemy who would oppose him on a battlefield thousands of miles from his homeland.

Even so, he told himself, reading a book and applying its lessons in war were two different things. Theory didn’t easily translate into practice. North Africa had dispatched more than one officer who thought reading about war was the same as fighting it.

He set aside the intelligence summary.

“The Americans seem to be improving,” he acknowledged to the officer. “We’ll see if it lasts.”

I didn’t yet know that in El Guettar, Patton had done more than just copy a page from his playbook.

For the men of the 10th Panzer Division, the trap developed slowly and then suddenly.

They advanced expecting, if not an easy victory, at least an opponent whose reactions they could predict. They believed the Americans would be stiff. They would hug obvious ridgelines, bunch up on the roads, and miscalculate the range of their own guns. German tank commanders expected to see clumsy deployments and punish them mercilessly.

In contrast, in the hours before dawn, as the first tanks advanced, the terrain seemed strangely quiet.

The artillery had fallen earlier, but now the horizon showed no clear targets. The hills surrounding the valley remained silent. Dust hung in the air, but no movement betrayed the enemy’s main line.

The German commanders, uneasy but confident, pressed on.

The first shot came from the side.

A tank on the left flank burst into flames, a column of black smoke rising into the gray morning. Before the crews could react, more flashes illuminated the dunes. Lines of tracer fire were directed toward the advancing formation from carefully selected positions, so close that the German gunners had only seconds to react.

It was the type of short-range ambush that Rommel had used countless times.

Only now the weapons were American.

Nestled behind low rises, dug into inverted hillsides, concealed among brush and rocks, the American anti-tank teams operated their weapons calmly, almost mechanically. Years later, some would admit to having been terrified. But at the time, training and discipline propelled them forward. Fire. Advance. Fire again. The roaring silhouettes of German panzers in the crosshairs. The impact. The strange sensation of time stretching and slipping away as the men worked at breakneck speed.

The German formation hesitated. Some tanks tried to turn toward the flashes, only to expose their flanks to another line of guns. Others fell back, seeking cover that suddenly seemed to have vanished from the landscape.

Behind the ambush line, the American artillery, pre-positioned along the likely approach routes, began to talk. Shells rained down in patterns designed not only to kill but to disrupt: roads were submerged and likely staging points were swept away. The German advance, which had begun with the confident roar of engines and the crunch of tracks, degenerated into a confusing swamp of smoke, burning vehicles, and broken radio traffic.

An officer from the 10th Panzer Division would later write that we felt “as if the enemy had read our thoughts and was waiting for every decision we made.”

This was precisely the feeling Patton wanted to evoke.

He had walked the terrain himself before the battle. The smell of dust and diesel. The feel of the ridges beneath his boots. He had studied the folds of the land and tried to get inside Rommel’s head. If he were the Desert Fox, where would he lead his panzers? Which valley would he choose? Which hill would he deem the Americans too foolish to properly occupy?

Then he positioned his weapons correctly.

“Let them come,” he told his artillery commanders. “Let them think it’s like Kasserine all over again. And then we’ll show them it’s not.”

When reports arrived that the 10th Panzer Division had withdrawn, having suffered staggering losses, Patton showed little apparent triumph. He was already thinking ahead, already planning counterattacks and new lines, already worried about what Rommel would do next.

But at Germany’s North African headquarters, the effect of the post-action reports was seismic.

Rommel read them carefully, twice.

The words were direct—German General Staff reports were almost always written in that precise, dispassionate style—but the implications were palpable between the lines. This new enemy had not only withstood a panzer assault, but had done so employing German-style defensive tactics and employing them competently. The Americans hadn’t positioned themselves by chance; they had constructed their positions with a clear understanding of how their opponent would think and move.

That night, as the oil lamp flickered dimly, Rommel opened his diary.

He did not usually indulge in prolonged reflections (the war left little time for that), but the shock of the day demanded some kind of acknowledgment.

“The Americans have a new commander,” he wrote with measured strokes. “This Patton is different from the others. He acts aggressively and demonstrates an understanding of maneuver warfare unusual for one of their generals. At El Guettar, his troops fought with a skill I did not expect from recently defeated forces.”

It wasn’t a surrender. It wasn’t a defeat. But it was, for the first time, something resembling respect.

In the following days, Rommel thought about this American more often than he would have liked.

The intelligence briefs kept coming in, now with Patton’s name appearing with unsettling regularity. The pace of American operations increased. There were fewer reports of disorganized retreats and more of coordinated counterattacks. German units began to notice that the American artillery seemed faster and more responsive, that their infantry was moving with renewed confidence, and that their armor was no longer advancing blindly.

In a report, a German officer commented bitterly that the Americans now seemed capable of “the same kind of rapid regrouping and counterattacks that we have used against them.”

Rommel sent a message to Field Marshal Kesselring on March 28. The language, for him, was unusually frank.

The U.S. II Corps, under General Patton, has shown a significant improvement in tactics and operational aggressiveness, he wrote. Its handling of terrain, coordination between armor and artillery, and the pace of its maneuvers indicate a professional thinking that its forces previously lacked. Patton appears to be a competent commander.

He did not write those words lightly.

He had never been generous in his assessment of the Allied generals. He considered many of them predictable: brave, yes, but bound by doctrine and custom. Montgomery, with his methodical deployment and overwhelming force. Auchinleck, with his cautious calculations. They were problems to be solved, not problems to be feared.

Patton… disturbed him.

Not because the American was reckless. Recklessness could be exploited. Recklessness created patterns. No, what worried Rommel was that Patton seemed to combine aggression with learning. He would take hits, adapt, and return with improved methods. He seemed to study the enemy with the same intensity with which he led his own men.

It was like watching a country age years in months.

On April 6, Rommel wrote to his wife, Lucie. The letter, like many he sent home, sought a balance between honesty and composure. But his writing failed to completely conceal his unease.

“We are now facing an American general named Patton in Tunisia,” he explained, outlining the situation. “From what I can see, he has thoroughly studied our way of fighting. His forces employ similar tactics to ours: rapid concentration, bold maneuvers, relentless pressure. It is as if he has learned from our successes and is turning them against us. There is a certain irony in this. We have shown the world how to wage mobile warfare; now we must fight those who have learned our lessons all too well.”

For a man whose pride lay in his reputation as a pioneer of that type of warfare, the admission had a painful effect.

He also discussed Patton with his team. In one meeting, after reading another report on American movements that suggested deliberate deception and carefully timed attacks, Rommel was silent for a moment, drumming his fingers on the edge of the map table.

“We’re not facing the same Americans we met at Kasserine anymore,” he concluded. “With Patton, they’re now serious opponents. He thinks like a tank commander should.”

One of his officers, perhaps still clinging to his earlier contempt, asked if Rommel considered this new general truly dangerous.

“Dangerous?” Rommel repeated. “Yes. But that’s not the word that matters.”

He looked up and his gaze was hard.

“He’s competent,” Rommel said. “And an aggressive fool is far less troublesome than a competent and aggressive commander.”

Despite all the respect he commanded, fate and the high command soon turned against him. Health problems and disagreements with Hitler over strategy led to Rommel’s withdrawal from North Africa in March 1943, before the Tunisian campaign reached its disastrous end for the Axis. He left having witnessed only the beginning of what Patton and the Americans were becoming.

But he did not forget it.

Back in Europe—first in Germany, then in France—Rommel observed from a distance the reports coming in from other fronts. In the east, the Red Army was bleeding the Wehrmacht dry. In the German skies, American bombers were appearing in increasing numbers. In the west, preparations for an Allied invasion of occupied Europe loomed like a storm on the horizon.

He spoke with Heinz Guderian, the architect of German armored doctrine, about what he had seen in Tunisia. Guderian, always inquisitive, asked him point-blank what he thought of Patton.

“Patton learned from us,” Rommel said, according to later recollections. “But he didn’t just copy. He understood the principles: the need for speed, decisive action, deception. And he applied them with American resources. That’s what makes him formidable.”

Guderian, who had spent years arguing with the German high command for greater freedom of maneuver and a greater focus on mobile operations, recognized the tacit implication: that the ideas they had fought for in their own army were flourishing, perhaps more fully, in that of the enemy.

“Is he your equal?” Guderian asked in a defiant tone.

Rommel shrugged slightly, thoughtfully.

“In Tunisia, I wasn’t in command long enough to have an opinion,” he replied. “But I wouldn’t want to face him in France with an entire army at his disposal.”

That prospect ceased to be hypothetical in the summer of 1944.

By then, the war had completely changed. The confident momentum of the early campaigns was gone. Germany was on the defensive everywhere: its armies were stretched to the limit, its fuel reserves were dwindling, and its cities were being bombed. In the west, Rommel commanded Army Group B, tasked with defending France from the inevitable Allied invasion.

When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6, he wasn’t there; he had returned home briefly for his wife’s birthday, and the surprise took him like any other German officer. But he returned quickly, throwing himself into the defense of a front that refused to behave like the neat, linear lines of a doctrine manual.

The Allied forces refused to be contained on the beaches. They consolidated, advanced inland, fought through hedgerows, learned, and adapted. And among them, commanding the U.S. Third Army after the Normandy breakthrough, was George Patton.

Rommel, from his headquarters, received regular reports on the situation. These became increasingly grim.

The Americans, under Patton’s command, were advancing through France at a pace that made staff officers murmur and check the figures. The arrows on the maps moved daily, then hourly, pushing deeper into the German frontier. Patton was doing in the west what the Germans had done in 1940, blasting through the countryside with a speed that seemed to defy logistics, leaving enemy units disoriented in his wake.

Rommel saw in those arrows an echo of his own early campaigns.

The rapid exploitations. The refusal to give the enemy time to regroup. The instinct to attack not where they were strong, but where they were stunned. It was a style of warfare he understood perfectly. He had once wielded it with terrifying results. Now he saw it being used against his own side, fueled by American industry and an Allied command structure that could afford to be audacious.

At some point, between briefings, between trips to inspect battered units at the front, between air raids, he found a quiet moment to write to his son, Manfred.

The boy had grown up hearing stories of his father, the desert hero. Rommel didn’t want to lie to him, but neither did he want to plunge him into despair. So he wrote, as he often did, in a tone that blended sincerity and reflection.

“I briefly clashed with the American general Patton in Africa,” he told his son. “He studied our methods and took them to heart. Now he commands an army that crosses France even faster than we did in 1940. There’s an irony in this that you’ll understand someday. The student surpasses the teacher. If Germany had had more generals with Patton’s audacity and had enjoyed the resources it now has at its disposal, perhaps this war would have taken a different course.”

It wasn’t self-pity. Rommel wasn’t driven by it. It was simply an acknowledgment of the cruel logic of war: ideas, once disseminated to the world, don’t belong solely to their creators. Others can appropriate them, refine them, and use them more effectively.

By July 1944, the war had taken a darker turn for Rommel.

Disillusioned with Hitler, convinced that the war as it was being fought was unwinnable and pointless, he gravitated toward those officers desperately seeking a way out. The July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler drew him into its orbit, and in the aftermath, the regime turned its suspicions upon him like a knife.

That same month, he was seriously wounded in an Allied air raid. As he recovered, with the doors of his world closing in, he is said to have spoken more frankly with his closest associates about the inexorable end of the war. He had seen too much, understood too well. The old illusions of invincibility had long since vanished.

In one conversation, an aide later recalled, Rommel spoke of the Americans in a tone of weary respect.

“The Americans, under Patton’s command, have achieved operational excellence,” he said. “Similar to what we once achieved. They use the principles we pioneered: speed, surprise, coordination, and they have the fuel and the factories to sustain them. It’s hard to admit, but they have mastered the art we taught them.”

It wasn’t a compliment. It was a professional assessment, the kind soldiers sometimes reserve for enemies they can’t help but respect.

When the Gestapo traced the lines from the July 20th conspirators to him, Hitler could not afford a public trial of his most famous field marshal. The regime arranged a different ending: a visit, a decision presented with the cold courtesy of bureaucrats, a final ride in an official car beneath the stillness of the trees.

Shortly before getting into that car, Rommel put his affairs in order as best he could. Among his papers were notes, reflections, and assessments. In one of his last written assessments of the war and his enemies, he made an observation that might have surprised those who saw him only as the Desert Fox, as the man who once reveled in victory.

History will decide whether I was a good commander, he wrote. But I can judge those I fought against. The British were brave, but often predictable. The Russians were numerous and unyielding. The Americans, under generals like Patton, were something special. They learned faster than any opponent. Patton took our ideas, improved them, and turned them against us. That is the most dangerous kind of enemy: one who studies you, understands you, and defeats you using your own knowledge.

From afar, Patton lived beyond the war, long enough to see victory, but not long enough to grow old with it. He carried his own complex memories: of battles won at a high price, of controversies, of a world moving faster than expected. He never met Rommel in person. They never sat down to discuss the campaigns that had intersected in their lives. The respect between them remained a silent, one-sided conversation, conducted through maps, reports, and the cruel medium of war.

However, the connection between them endures in the historical imagination.

One was the master of a new kind of warfare in its infancy, a man who showed the world what tanks, radios, and audacity could achieve on the open battlefield. The other was the student who read those lessons, embraced them, and pursued them with tireless energy and the backing of American industry.

In Tunisia, for a few brief weeks, their paths overlapped.

Rommel, at the height of his fame, looked across the desert and saw a new flag, a new enemy, and dismissed him. Then he watched, astonished, as that enemy adapted, hardened, and began to think in ways that were strangely familiar to him.

Patton, humiliated by Kasserine, opened a book written by the man who had just defeated his countrymen and let his ideas seep into his bones. Then he ventured into the same desert and turned those ideas into weapons.

The clash between them was not a duel or a dramatic personal confrontation. It was something more subtle and, in a way, deeper: a battle of minds in which one man’s doctrine became the other’s arsenal. The Desert Fox realized, too late, that the hunters he had mocked had been watching him closely, learning his every move, memorizing his tricks.

What did Rommel say when Patton outsmarted him, when the American guns at El Guettar roared with the same cold efficiency that his own had displayed two years earlier?

He didn’t scream. He didn’t rage against fate. He didn’t make excuses about the weather, supplies, or bad luck.

He did something even stranger.

He admitted, privately, that he had underestimated his enemy.

He warned his superiors that they should no longer underestimate the Americans. He wrote to his family that someone on the other side had learned his methods too well. He told his comrades that Patton thought like a tank commander and that this made him an immense danger. And in his final reflections, when the desert dust lay far behind him, he acknowledged that the method of warfare he had helped to create had been perfected by those who fought against him.

Rommel had dedicated his life to proving that on the battlefield, experience and audacity could overcome strength. In Patton, he saw proof that experience could be learned and audacity, imitated.

The Desert Fox, the original master of mobile warfare, recognized in the American general not an imitator, but an heir.

And although their tanks never exchanged fire within sight of each other, although their voices never crossed a room, their encounter in North Africa left a message that resonated throughout the rest of the war:

The amateur era was over.

The Americans had come of age in the crucible of the desert, and Rommel—the proud, brilliant, and inflexible Rommel—was the one who said so.