"Detachments of a German expeditionary force under an obscure general, Rommel, have landed in North Africe."
The announcement was perfunctory but rather interesting. It had been issued in an Intelligence summary by the British High Command early in March 1941, and I read it in a document captured at Keren, on the Eritrean front, where I was in command of a scratch detachment of German troops -- seamen from ships blockaded by the Royal Navy in the Italian Red Sea port of Massawa. I had no reason to suppose, when I idly noted this scrap of information, that I should be face to face with this particular General only eight days, later, or that for months in the Western Desert I should be at his side so often when we were intensively attacked.