Erwin Rommel

Rommel’s first fame came in 1940, not 1942. Given the 7th Panzer Division in the invasion of France — an armoured command he had not previously trained for — he drove it across the Meuse and then across northern France so fast that the German high command repeatedly lost track of where it was. It became known as the Ghost Division, and the nickname is exact: Rommel was moving faster than the reporting system built to describe him. He was not executing a plan so much as reading a road, a river crossing, a hesitation in the defenders, and pressing wherever the resistance gave. When a French column blocked him, he went through it rather than around it, on the entirely sensory judgement that troops being shot at while retreating do not fight well.

In the desert the same instinct had more room. His signature act at Sidi Rezegh and again during the Gazala battles was to appear personally at the decisive point, take over whatever units were there regardless of their formal chain of command, and use them immediately. The famous improvisation — swinging 88mm anti-aircraft guns down to fire horizontally at British armour — was less an invention than a refusal to be limited by what a weapon was labelled for. An Se-dominant sees an object’s properties, not its category: a high-velocity gun with a flat trajectory is a tank-killer whatever the manual says.

It made him almost impossible to script against. British commanders planned against the German order of battle and found themselves fighting a man who had already discarded it. But the same faculty made him structurally incapable of sitting still while a situation matured. Twice he launched offensives — after Tobruk in June 1942 most damagingly — because the opportunity in front of him looked irresistible, and drove deep into Egypt on a supply line he had already been warned could not sustain him. The moment was real. The month afterwards was not survivable.

What separates Rommel from a merely brave front-line officer is the analytical edge underneath the aggression. Before the war he wrote Infanterie greift an — Infantry Attacks — a cool, technical dissection of his own First World War actions in the Alps and at Caporetto, where as a junior officer he had taken thousands of prisoners with a handful of men. The book is not a memoir of glory; it is a manual of principles extracted from experience, argued in the pared-down, cause-and-effect register of someone taking a machine apart to see what makes it work. Ti is the function that builds an internal model from first principles and trusts that model over doctrine, and Rommel’s whole tactical repertoire is that model applied at speed.

The desert battles are full of it: the anti-tank screen deliberately used as bait, drawing British armour onto a gun line rather than meeting it tank-to-tank; the reverse-slope positioning; the calculated decision at Gazala to accept encirclement in the Cauldron and fight outward, which looked like recklessness and was in fact an accurate reading of where his opponents’ command structure would fail to concentrate against him. These are not lucky improvisations. They are a consistent, internally coherent theory of combined arms, executed by a man who could hold the whole mechanism in his head while it was moving.

Ti also explains his notorious difficulty as a subordinate. He argued with superiors, ignored instructions he judged unsound, and treated the Italian command structure nominally above him as an obstacle rather than an authority. Internal logic outranked hierarchy. It served him brilliantly at divisional and corps level, where the model he built matched the reality in front of him, and served him badly at theatre level, where the relevant variables — shipping tonnage, Ultra decrypts he did not know existed, the strategic priority of the Eastern Front — lay entirely outside his sensory reach and could not be reasoned to from the ground.

Rommel had a genuine feel for how he appeared. He courted war correspondents, understood the propaganda value of the photograph of the general in goggles among his men, and cultivated — sincerely, as far as anyone can tell — a code of conduct in the desert war that made him a figure his enemies could respect. He is credibly reported to have ignored the Commando Order requiring captured special-forces troops to be shot, and the Afrika Korps’ treatment of prisoners was, by the standards of that war, decent. Tertiary Fe is not empathy in the deep sense; it is a keen, somewhat performative sensitivity to the impression one is making, and Rommel had it in abundance.

But the Desert Fox was co-produced. The British needed him. A run of humiliating defeats in 1941 and 1942 demanded an explanation more flattering than incompetence, and a brilliant, gentlemanly, almost superhuman opponent supplied one — while also guaranteeing that the eventual victory over him would count for something. Churchill told the House of Commons that across the havoc of war he might say of Rommel: a great general. Auchinleck, less romantically, had to circulate an order to his own commanders instructing them to stop talking about Rommel as if he were a supernatural force, because the myth was corroding their willingness to attack. That order is the best evidence that the legend was operating as a British psychological fact, not merely a German one.

Both propaganda machines fed it, for opposite reasons, and it survived the war because postwar West Germany needed an untainted soldier and the Western allies needed a German they could honourably have fought. The man underneath was more ordinary and more compromised: a professional soldier who owed his early advancement to Hitler’s personal favour, commanded the Führer’s escort battalion, and served the regime loyally through most of the war without visible moral crisis.

Inferior Ni arrives suddenly, totally, and usually as doom. Rommel spent two years unable to think past the next fortnight’s fuel, and then, somewhere in 1943 and 1944, arrived at a single overwhelming conclusion and would not be moved from it: the war was lost. He said so to Hitler’s face at a level of bluntness few field marshals attempted. Given command of the Atlantic Wall defences in France, he built the same conviction into concrete — the invasion had to be stopped on the beaches in the first day, because after that nothing could be stopped at all. His argument with Gerd von Rundstedt and the panzer reserve dispute was, at bottom, an argument between a man who thought there would be a long campaign to fight and a man who was certain there would not.

Then July 1944. Rommel’s connection to the plot against Hitler was real but peripheral and is still disputed: he was known to and courted by conspirators, appears to have favoured arresting Hitler and negotiating rather than assassination, and was strafed and gravely wounded in Normandy days before the bomb went off. Under interrogation his name surfaced. The regime could not afford to try its most famous soldier, so it offered him the arithmetic instead: take cyanide, and your wife keeps her pension, your son is left alone, and the state buries you with a hero’s funeral and a fiction about wounds.

He took the poison in a car on a road outside Herrlingen on 14 October 1944, having told his family what was about to happen. Germany was informed he had died of his injuries and given him a state funeral. It is the one moment in his life that has nothing sensory about it — no improvisation, no reading of the ground, no way out — only a man calculating a future he could not touch and paying for it with his life. The inferior function, when it finally speaks, speaks once.

Why ESTP Over ESFP

The ESTP reading holds because it explains the failure as neatly as the success. Se-Ti gives you a commander who is unbeatable in the frame of a battle and helpless in the frame of a campaign — who repeatedly wins the engagement in front of him at a cost to the war behind him, and who cannot bring himself to fight the boring, abstract, months-in-advance fight over tanker sailings and port capacity that would actually have decided North Africa. A different type with half his tactical gift and twice his patience might have done better in Libya. Nobody with his gift would have been half as interesting to write about, which is precisely why the legend took.