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ROMMEL AND THE REBEL

By Lawrence Wells. 415 pp. New York: Doubleday & Company. $17.95.

FIVE German Army officers, traveling under assumed names, arrive in New York in June 1937, on their way to Oxford, Miss., where an R.O.T.C. professor of tactics at the University of Mississippi is to explain to them the fighting methods of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. German officers openly visited United States military sites and even attended American military schools before the war, but in his novel, ''Rommel and the Rebel,'' Lawrence Wells packs this delegation with three future field marshals: Erwin Rommel, who would become ''the desert fox''; Walter Model, who succeeded von Rundstedt as the commander in chief in the west; and Ferdinand Schorner, later to head three different army groups in Russia.

To serve as translator the R.O.T.C. professor has summoned the young Lieut. Speigner, an ''Ole Miss'' graduate in German studies, now collecting information on future German commanders in an obscure office in the War Department. He already has a complete dossier on Rommel in his files.

Sometimes a historical novelist will invent improbabilities when an exploitation of the actual facts might serve him well. For example, in this novel the German attache, General Boetticher, might have suggested that before the officers left Berlin they call on a brilliant American major who was then a student at the German War College. The major might have invited them to stop in Washington to see his father-in-law, chief of the war plans division. They might also have paid their respects in Berlin to the American military attache, later an intelligence expert on the German Army. The young Major Wedemeyer, then in school in Berlin, was to help develop the cross-Channel attack plans, which were Rommel's undoing at Normandy. The historical possibilities abound.

In ''Rommel and the Rebel,'' Mr. Wells wants to write about the potential influence of General Forrest's way of fighting on Rommel's tactics. He makes Lieut. Speigner the one Allied officer who can predict Rommel's actions.

In New York Rommel escapes from his group to see a baseball game, to chat with a Harlem streetwalker by using his pocket dictionary; he outwits three muggers in Central Park. Watching a re-enactment of the battle of Gettysburg, Rommel climbs Little Round Top as if he were a combatant. In Washington he makes a late-night visit to the Lincoln Memorial, where a young black boy helps him translate the Gettysburg Address.

In Mississippi, after the Germans have retraced the fighting at Brices Cross Roads, Rommel meets William Faulkner at a party. Faulkner drags him away for a midnight game of tennis and an introduction to sipping whisky. They set out in Faulkner's car in the middle of the night for Shiloh, the young lieutenant as a fly on the wall while the novelist expatiates on Forrest's spirit and also guesses that the pseudonymous ''Mr. Rilke'' is really Rommel.

The half of the novel that takes place in the States is discursive and reverential toward Rommel. What he is thinking is related as well as what he does, and there are long harangues by various characters on Civil War battles and on Forrest. THE writing becomes more active in the second half of the book, which jumps four years to the Western Desert in Egypt. The British, threatened by the desert fox, discover Lieut. Speigner and his special knowledge about Rommel. Once near the fighting, Speigner gets involved, even though the United States is not yet in the war. After the American entry, the lieutenant persuades an Australian pilot to fly him over the German lines. The plane crashes and Speigner is captured personally by Rommel, then frees himself and takes the field marshal captive; the arrival of German forces saves Rommel for the battles at Alamein and Normandy, and sends Speigner to a prison camp. In the fall of 1944, in the camp, Speigner sees a movie of the splendid state funeral given Rommel, who had cheated the hangman by agreeing to take poison as punishment for his part in an attempt on Hitler's life.

Mr. Wells draws on well-known secondary sources for his accounts of Rommel and Forrest. The editor of a book on Faulkner and a resident of Oxford, Miss., he makes the brief appearance of the novelist the most interesting part of his book. The snippets on Gettysburg, Brices Cross Roads, Shiloh, and especially the lively action in the Western Desert, have a strong cinematic appeal. The idea that Forrest's tactics surfaced again in World War II makes fascinating reading even if Rommel never made it to Mississippi. [/u][u]