Desert War : The North African Campaign 1940-1943, Comprising Mediterranean Front, a Year of Battle, the End in Africa by Alan Moorehead Penguin USA, 2001, softcover 656 pages ISBN 0140275142 $19.00

In the period between the fall of France and the entry of the United States into the war, the Mediterranean was unquestionably the lifeline of the British Empire, connecting metropolitan Britain with her colonies and possessions in Asia and the Middle East.  Through the Strait of Gibraltar, past Vichy France, Fascist Italy, Malta, Greece, and Crete, and through the Suez Canal, streamed the all important  flow of supplies, raw materials and information.  Europe to the north was under the heel of German and Italian collaborators.  If  North Africa had fallen, not only would the swastika and fasces have flown over Suez, Cairo and Jerusalem, but the Axis would have been poised to capture the vital oil fields of Persia and Iraq, Turkey might have been forced into the Axis, and a strategically dominant, Axis controlled, land bridge to Asia created.  Given the vital strategic import of the campaign, it's difficult to understand why it doesn't command a greater portion of the historic limelight.  Mention Patton, Zhukov, or Guderian and eyes light up.  Talk about Bastogne, Remagen, or Kursk and knowing glances are exchanged.  But proffer the words Auchinleck, Graziani, Sidi Rezegh and Halfaya and one might as well be talking to the wind.

Part of the relative obscurity of the North African campaign stems from the ethnocentricity of many Second World War historians.  When writing from an American perspective it is tempting to dismiss or at least downplay the importance of portions of the war that did not involve American forces.  As a result, the Battle of Britain, which involved three "Eagle Squadrons" (Number 71, 121, and 133 Squadrons of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command) composed of American aviators in British service, has been prolifically chronicled.  The war in the desert did not involve American forces and as a result has not been as well documented.  Another explanation for the lack of information about the war in North Africa (at least prior to the Torch landings in late 1942) has to do with its dazzling complexity.  The battle lines were so fluid, the position of the "front" so rapidly changing, and the number and names of commanders so great, that effectively chronicling the campaign's history becomes a monumental effort that many historians either avoid or inadequately accomplish.  It's almost as if the war in the desert cannot be adequately recounted by one who didn't live it.

One man who did live it, and wrote about it was Alan Moorehead.  A talented and well known writer with books including Gallipoli, Darwin and the Beagle and The Russian Revolution to his credit, in 1940 Moorehead was a correspondent for the London Daily Express newspaper assigned to cover the war being waged by the British and Commonwealth forces that comprised the Army of the Nile.  While nominally based in Cairo, where he lived with his wife and infant son, Moorehead was no armchair correspondent.  Instead, he traveled with the Army across the vast expanses of desert and lived the life of a common soldier or junior officer, albeit one who received regular briefings from command groups on the state of the campaign.  Sleeping in the sand, catching meals of tinned beef and moldering biscuits when possible, and braving bombs, bullets and shells, Moorehead gained the many perspectives so necessary for an intimate understanding of a vast and fluid campaign.  As a result, the reader sees the war through the viewpoint of the general staff, the small unit commanders, individual soldiers (both axis and allied), and has all these disparate images focused through the eyes of a very well educated, informed and articulate narrator.

That Desert War is a narrative is indisputable.  Equally important however, is what the book is not.  Strictly speaking, it is not a history.  While bringing to the table all of his observations, perceptions and keen analyses, Moorehead also brings his preconceptions, biases and prejudices.  Moorehead is a well educated, liberal minded, imperial Englishman, and it shows.  However, far from detracting from the book, these biases tend to crystallize Moorehead's perceptions and analyses, giving them form and substance, all to the reader's benefit.  While Desert War may not provide the reader with a balanced and unbiased account of military operations in North Africa during World War Two, one comes away with a gut-level understanding of why the campaign was waged, its consequences, and how it touched people ranging from the private soldier to generals, colonists, natives, kings, and emperors.  Moorehead's talent for literary empathy, which brings the reader into his world, almost able to feel the concussion of the explosions, the grit in one's food and the sting of the wind driven sand in one's face, places him within the ranks of writers such as Studs Terkel, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell.  Indeed, in many ways, Desert War is reminiscent of a slightly more even handed Homage to Catalonia.

The comparison to Hemingway and Orwell is even more apt when considering Moorehead's ability as a writer.  His use of language is clear and precise.  Words are well chosen, and flowery, inappropriate prose is kept to a minimum.  In many ways, Desert War represents one of the best meldings of the journalist's art with that of the historian and diarist available on any subject.  It's positively a joy to read - engaging,
and intriguing to the extent that it's almost painful to put down.  For admirers of the written word, turning each page will be an exquisite agony, as one dreads coming nearer to the inevitable conclusion of the book.  A few examples provide an indication of the extent of Moorehead's talent:

(A description of wartime Khartoum, the capital of Sudan)

From the flying-boat anchorage upstream they drive you past a landmark called 'Gordon's tree' into the town of Khartoum which Kitchener laid out in the form of the Union Jack. Every writer on Khartoum recalls this harmless piece of Victorian jingoism- probably because it suggests the whole of the Sudan so strongly. The place is not jingoistic. It is just a well-run empire country club. They tend to pick Blues rather than dons for the Civil Service. But Big White Carstairs flourishes here in his most amiable form, a friendly hospitable man and not a bore. It is a country where every white man is something. He is Jones of the railways or Gibson of cotton or a white hunter or a district commissioner or a soldier.  Almost the lowest rank any white officer can hold in the Sudan Defence Force is Bimbashi-major. . . .

But British rule is on the whole benevolent and progressive, and certainly the best advertisement for empire I have seen. Which is strange, for the lush rich colonies seem not as a rule to have attracted diligent enthusiastic men, while the pitiless Sudanese deserts abound in the type that is just born to administer and control. This you see when you are driven on your arrival to the Grand Hotel, the place where the administrators come to take their refreshment and listen to the B.B.C. Here on the terrace, which is perhaps two degrees cooler than the smiting sunshine outside, you meet ivory hunters and coffee planters from Juba and Wau up the river. On that terrace I was introduced to the pleasant custom of taking a bottle of iced beer for breakfast. From there I saw my first wild hippopotamus floating down the White Nile.

It was always pleasant to get back to the Grand Hotel, though now when I drove up in the early summer it was much altered. There was great movement in the lounge and the terrace was crowded. Soldiers and airmen moved about everywhere-General Legentilhomme of the Free French and one of Haile Selassie's aides-de-camp, a naval officer from Port Sudan and a South African brigadier-all these in addition to the habitues. And Wavell and de Gaulle coming from opposite directions were expected on the morrow. Two Tomahawks flew by, and staff cars kept driving up to the hotel. Down the road headquarters had filled a whole great red-brick block and the place buzzed like a hive. You no longer knew each officer by name-the staff had multiplied out
of all knowledge and lurked behind strings of initials placarded upon its offfice doors.

Khartoum was at war in all seriousness now. Keren was about to fall, and Keren to the people of the Sudan was the hub of the war. Many had been killed and wounded there. For six weeks the Italians had thrust the imperial forces off those immense slopes. And now at last we had cleared the roadblocks and won the governing peaks. The vital attack was about to be launched and there was not even time for me to make the two or three days' car journey there across the desert through Kassala. It was a little difficult to assimilate all this at a moment's notice, and people bandied about the place names too quickly for one to follow. Sanchil and Ngordat meant nothing to me. I decided then to cut my losses and abandon any attempt to report Keren at first hand. Addis Ababa, after all, was the prize, and it did not seem to me that even if Lieutenant-General Platt took Keren he could carry on down the Dessie road to the capital before the Africans under Lieutenant-General Cunningham got there from the south.

And now machine-guns and small-arms fire cracked through the din of bombs and exploding shells. At Heraklion and Suda and Canea and Maleme the Imperial troops were firing straight out of their trenches and rock shelters into the sky. The aircraft were spilling out the parachutists from only a few hundred feet, and as they came down, squirming and running with their legs to break the fall, the British picked them off with Bren guns and Lewis guns, with rifles and pistols, with hand grenades and bayonets. Sometimes a whole sector of the sky, crowded with parachutists, would fill the sights of a machine-gun, so that all were killed in the air and the parachutes would deposit only inert, clumsy bodies on the ground.

As the enemy soldiers came down they could be heard calling to one another to rally their spirits or warn one another of the dangers below, and those that landed safely and found a little shelter from the bullets that were flying everywhere started shouting for others to join them. It was essential for them to keep together, for alone they were helpless, and since one man might be carrying the barrel of a machine-gun, another the base, and a third the ammunition, they
were not an effective unit unless they got together.

All the falling men were heavily booted and heavily harnessed with equipment. They wore camouflaged overalls with the parachutists'special badge, and a rimless helmet. They wore wrist and ankle bandages. In their packs were blankets, little stoves and utensils for boiling water, water bottles, clips of ammunition, sacks of hand grenades, knives, gloves, greatcoats, torches, underclothing and many other things the soldier carries. Most had tommy-guns and pistols. Many had as well the parts of heavier guns, bicycles, signaling and radio sets, and all manner of weapons that might be used in guerrilla warfare.

Some had a trick of turning a somersault as they were about to land in order to break their fall. They were only a few seconds in the air, and instinctively they clutched at a device to release them from their parachutes as soon as they were down. Then they would crouch behind bushes and wriggle forward among the rocks, calling to their fellows until enough were banded together to make a knot of resistance.

But their tommy-guns had a range only of two hundred yards, and the British standing back from a safe distance would pick them off at four or five hundred yards with rifles and machine-guns. Again and again in the thick of this day's fighting the British charged into close quarters with bayonet and hand grenade, for there was a moment when the parachutist had first landed when he was dazed and could be taken prisoner, or knifed.

Every enemy soldier was working upon rigid instructions set out for him on his maps. The coast had been carefully charted, and the men were dropped according to a set design. But in the descent and on the ground all became confusion, because so many were killed and wounded, and the heavy firing not only of guns and rifles but of bombs made an already unfamiliar territory doubly strange. At scattered points all down the coast from Heraklion to Maleme it went on, while flames lifted over the burning village houses and the olive groves, and along every road and upon every village the incessant heavy dive-bombing went on and on.

Upon Suda came something that had never been seen in action in the world before-glider troops. Over the great knoll that forms the seaward side of the bay came big, troop-carrying aeroplanes, drawing gliders behind them. The gliders were attached to the mother craft by a cable, and each glider had the wingspread of a large passenger machine. They carried ten men. As they swept up to the bay the glider pilots slipped their cables and floated out over the rocky hills looking for a landing place, and the men who saw them come said they were more sinister than the parachutists, stranger and more menacing.

Some flew straight upon Corps Headquarters, as though they would land there, and each soldier below felt the landing would be made upon his own head.  But the wings tilted just over the treetops, and in a swift rush the gliders were carried over the hilltop. Clearly the pilots had expected a flat space there where they could land or pancake down, but their maps were at fault. The machines crashed heavily in a sharp rocky valley and the crews and passengers were killed outright. Others wrecked themselves among the scrub and rock around Maleme, where the parachutists were falling thickly, and the British gunners were upon them before the unwounded men could rise and make a stand.

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