You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio Fall. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us. And may I say across the havoc of

war a great general, said Winston Churchill, of this man.

A career-hungry gambler who sacrifices his soldiers pointlessly, said some of this man's critics among the axis top brass.

Dubbed the Desert Fox when he fought the Allies in North Africa during World War II,

immortalized by the 1951 film of the same name, he was admired both by his troops and his

enemies, us, for his skills on the battlefield.

And he was admired by Adolf Hitler. Field Marshal Ervin Rommel was for a time Hitler's favorite general

until he was finally forced to kill himself under pressure from the Nazi leader,

who suspected him of taking part in a plot.

And championing him as a great life is Ray Meers, expert on Bushcraft and survival, who most of us

will know from his TV programs that he's presented over the last two decades.

Survival tactics being clever at using the environment you find yourself in.

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