“...Even enemies were given celebrity. Rommel was a household name among the Allies...”
You bring up some interesting facts.
B.H. Liddell Hart makes some points about giving celebrity to commanders. In THE GERMAN GENERALS TALK, he makes a case that the relatively young Rommel and the much older von Rundstedt were given lots of publicity by Hitler/Goebbels while equally important generals were often “soldiers in the shadow”. There was a certain image the Nazis wanted to project and von Manstein, Halder, Kluge, and many others did not present that image.
That’s true. Omar Bradley was a very competent general, but he didn’t have Patton’s swagger or Eisenhower’s easy delivery.