Desmond Young

Brigadier Desmond Young (27 December 189127 June 1966) was an Australian-born British Army officer, newspaper publisher and writer. He is known for his laudatory biography of the Nazi German field marshal Erwin Rommel (Rommel: The Desert Fox, 1950), which helped create the Rommel myth.

Early life and First World War Desmond Young was born in Port Adelaide, South Australia in 1891. His father, Frederick William Young was a marine salvage expert and in his youth Young accompanied him on trips around the world. Young matriculated at the University of Oxford but attended no lectures and was asked to leave. He then travelled to the British Malaya to work as a rubber planter. On 1 October he was promoted to lieutenant in the 9th battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and on 13 February 1915 to captain. Young was wounded while serving in the trenches of the Western Front and, while recovering, missed serving in the Third Battle of Ypres. He passed his time in convalescence writing war poetry.

After the war Young ran the Quadrant nightclub in London, which apparently employed Juliette Compton, and claimed the police forced him to leave the business. He rose quickly in rank and held command of the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade during Operation Aberdeen, a 5 June 1942 attack ordered by Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie during the Battle of Gazala. The 10th captured all of their objectives at a thinly-held portion of the German line at Aslagh Ridge but subsequent British attacks on the main defensive line failed. A counter-attack by the German 21st Panzer Division penetrated the British defences in an area of ground known as The Cauldron and disordered part of Young's brigade. Young was one of 3,100 men captured on 6 June.

In Young's account, he benefitted from Erwin Rommel's personal intervention in captivity when a German officer tried to compel him to order the surrender of a British artillery position. According to his memoirs, Young was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, led the camp's escape committee, and escaped successfully to Switzerland where, by the war's end, he was editing a newspaper for interned British soldiers. Despite only meeting Rommel once Young was inspired to write a biography of the man. By 1948, he had begun to work with Rommel's widow on the field marshal's records in Herrlingen. Young's book was adapted by Nunnally Johnson into the 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, with James Mason in the title role. He produced two memoirs, Try Anything Twice and the 1961 work All the Best Years. Young moved to Sark, an island in the English Channel governed by a feudal system, around 1962. He was married with two children and died at his home on Sark on 27 June 1966 aged 74.