You know if skateboards had been around when Rommel was a kid, “Doing a Rommel” would have ended up in the Skateboard Dictionary. Pfirsich would have been so stoked.
Nothing is being made up from whole cloth (so to speak) about Rommel’s going into action naked. The man literally stripped and dived — there is no other efficient way to enter freezing water — into a winter river to shove a machine gun on a small raft across to where he and his squad successfully took their objective.
His health never quite recovered, but then none of us get over the things we think we can get away with when we’re kids. Throw yourself off a rolling horse, get up off the ground with a 40-year-old back. Break your neck skateboarding, spend life with an 80-year-old upper spine. No use warning your fellow borders; they’re all immortal, like young soldiers, and it Can’t Happen To Them.
Rommel had food-poisoning during his first World War One battle, and his stomach could never digest properly again. The course of battles he directed in the second world war may have been changed because he was such a fearless young soldier in the first, who thought he could do anything with immunity from exposing himself to water too frigid to humans, to putting any old food in his mouth.
It was a bad habit he really never got over, as described by an Italian officer, who was hungry during a sortie with Rommel, and was offered some nasty old bread the German officer absent-mindedly pulled out of his pocket. There’s an amusing photo of Rommel with a sandwich in one hand, binoculars in the other, cheek crammed with food he’s obviously stuffing down without tasting or chewing. No wonder the man got belly-aches.
