Britains Desert War In Egypt Libya 1940 1942 PDF Download

In the struggle against Hitler, each of Britain's armed forces fought a battle it had to win. For the Royal Air Force it was the Battle of Britain. For the Royal Navy it was the Battle of the Atlantic. And for the army it was El Alamein. In 1940 the Battle of Britain had kept Britain in the war, only for two years of almost unrelieved disaster to follow: humiliating defeats in Greece and the Far East, and the seemingly inexorable German advance into the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1942 documents were even being burned in Cairo, as Germany's brilliant celebrity general Erwin Rommel threatened to sweep aside the Eighth Army and drive his forces through to the Suez Canal. But then in October 1942, with Churchill's government in desperate need of a military victory, British and Common-wealth troops under Montgomery embarked on a First World War-style battle of attrition in Egypt's Western Desert. After twelve days and thirteen nights they broke through the German and Italian lines at El Alamein. It was a defeat from which Rommel would never recover, and a turning-point in the war famously celebrated by Churchill as 'the end of the beginning' -- the line in the sand Hitler's forces were unable ever to cross. Like his magisterial history of the Battle of Britain, The Most Dangerous Enemy -- already acknowledged as the definitive account -- Stephen Bungay's Alamein is a trenchant re-examination of an event now cloaked in myth. Though the propaganda of the time focussed on personalities, this was a desert war, he reveals, determined largely by logistics. In a conflict that for two years had ebbed and flowed along the North African littoral, victory was always going to go to the side that mastered its supply lines -- in Britain's case not least by withstanding the epic siege of Malta. He also gets beyond the polemics and eulogies of many past writers in re-assessing Alamein's chief protagonists, Montgomery and Rommel, to show how it was precisely the most unattractive side of Montgomery's character that was needed to transform the Eighth Army into a force capable of fighting a battle it could win. But above all Alamein is a magnificently readable narrative illuminating every aspect of the desert war, from the grand strategy of the wider struggle for control of the Mediterranean to the movingly human, in a graphic evocation of the phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade, baking heat and tormenting flies that was the soldier's war. In the year of the sixtieth anniversary of Alamein, this superb book is a gripping re-telling of one of the crucial battles of the war. Book jacket.