Ronald Lewin

George Ronald Lewin CBE (11 October 1914 – 6 January 1984), professionally known as Ronald Lewin, was a British author, radio producer and publishing editor.

Career

Lewin was educated at The Queen's College, Oxford where he was a Hastings Scholar and Goldsmiths’ Exhibitioner. He was an editorial assistant at Jonathan Cape from 1937, and served in the Royal Artillery in North Africa and Northwest Europe 1939-45. He was in the BBC Home service 1946-1965, going from producer in 1946 to Chief in 1963. He was then an editor at Hutchinson Publishing from 1963 to 1969.

Lewin wrote several books on World War II and commanders e.g. Erwin Rommel, Bernard Montgomery, Vyvyan Pope, Archibald Wavell and William Slim (Slim the Standard-Bearer received the WH Smith Literary Award). He wrote two books on Ultra (Europe) and The Other Ultra (Japan).

Reception

Lewin's biography Rommel as Military Commander (1968) has been described by the historian Alaric Searle as "uncritical and effusive", part of the tradition that cemented the Rommel legend, a view that the Field Marshal was an apolitical, brilliant commander and a victim of the Third Reich due to his (now disputed) participation in the 20 July plot against Adolf Hitler.[1] The historian Patrick Major states that the work focused on the military career of Rommel, depoliticising it and presenting him strictly as a soldier. In another work on the North African campaign, the 1977 The Life and Death of the Africa Korps, Lewin wrote that it was "possible and necessary to assert that (...) the purity of the desert purified the desert war", contributing to the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.[2]

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Searle 2014, pp. 7–8, 26.
  2. ↑ Major 2008, p. 527.

Bibliography

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