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Are you Friedrich saying that Patton and Monty admired a General who was not good enough...
He must have been at least a bit good...
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He sure was. At division and army corps level, he was a fantastic frontline leader. His performance in France at the head of the 7th Panzer says it all, doesn't it?
His tactical skills and peculiar creative genious was outstanding in the first campaigns of the Afrika Korps. But his impressive successes often happened at the same time (and most likely because of) than British disasters or biggest failures.
What would have been the result of 1941 campaign if general O'Connor and all his staff weren't captured? What if general Wavell hadn't had to deploy his forces and supplies at Greece, Crete and Syria? What if marshal Kesselring hadn't neutralised Malta before Rommel's most succesfull offensives? What if the British hadn't had the awkward command system they had? What if the British hadn't had to divert many resources and units to fight the Japanese in 1942? What if the British had not been at the end of a 2.000 km supply line at the time of Rommel's offensives?
Rommel fought well, definately. He took his units to the maximum, and put much more weight on audacity and surprise rather than careful planning. He took advantage of the tactical skills and experience of his officers, as well as the supperiority in technicnology and tactics of his armoured units. But he didn't change his 'southern encirclement' tactic throughout the campaign. And this frustrated his offensives, because he miserably failed at frontal attacks at Tobrouk and El Alamein.
Then, in November 1942, a leader like Rommel, who was good at disgising old Italian Fiat cars as tanks and building deadly and effcient mine fields, simply was not the man to fight at El Alamein, a deffensive set-piece battle full with frontal attacks. Such battle recquired detailed and careful planning (tactical and strategic) and careful training and logistical build-up.
A frontline commander can't command an entire Army from the front. He must be at his HQ making decisions for the whole front, and leaving the front commanders to make their own decisions. Rommel made neither, and that's why he had El Alamein lost before hand.
At Normandy, he was the perfect man to inspect and reinforce costal defences: to plant mines, booby-traps, flood fields, plant 'asparragus', place artillery and machine guns. But he did not have the strategic vision to command the great battles like Falaise or Caën at Army Group level. He accurately found Von Rundstedt's strategy impossible under the circumstances, but he failed to see that his own strategy of immediate counterattack was impossible as well.
The North Africa campaign is weird, in fact… Patton never actually fought against Rommel, and Rommel was halted or defeated by true strategists like Wavell, Auchinleck and Montgomery…
He was the right man at the right moment at the right place. And he took advantage of it. But the rest was luck.