Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1806971 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
In End of the Beginning Tim Clayton and Phil Craig use the same techniques of oral history employed for their previous book. Finest Hour described the events of the first full year of the Second World War, 1940, highlighting the drama of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain by telling the story largely though the testimony of those who were there. End of the Beginning traces the desperate days from May to November 1942, as Rommel swept through north Africa in a seemingly unstoppable drive towards Cairo, only to be finally halted and defeated by Montgomery's Eighth Army. The story of the desert war has been told often enough, most recently in John Bierman's and Colin Smith's excellent Alamein: War Without Hate, but the use of oral testimony makes End of the Beginning a particularly vivid account. It's one thing to read a historian's bird's eye perspective on battle and quite another to follow, for example, a particular gun-crew in the desert as they struggle to make sense of the seeming chaos surrounding them.

The focus of End of the Beginning is always on north Africa, as indeed was the attention of Churchill and his generals at the time, but the authors also find room to record the experiences of both combatants and non-combatants elsewhere. A nurse working in a hospital on the besieged island of Malta. A US soldier caught up in the fiasco that was the raid on Dieppe. A young woman involved in the briefing of RAF bomber crews flying from airfields in Yorkshire. The strength of this often powerful and moving book lies in the glimpses it offers of ordinary men and women obliged to do their best in extraordinary, and bloody, times. --Nick Rennison

From Publishers Weekly
After collaborating on the documentary film series Finest Hour and its companion book, Clayton and Craig return with this chronicle of the Allies' travails during the dark year of 1942. They begin with an introduction that describes major wartime figures, as well as a number of veterans who appear throughout the book, including British tank officer Peter Vaux. Events at the highest command levels, involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Allied generals, leaven tales of battle action that feature the veterans' accounts. Action at Knightsbridge Box (an important British position) and Bir Hakim (held by the Free French), for example, cuts to a nurse's experiences on the island of Malta, under aerial siege by the Axis, and those of an RAF pilot in action in the Middle East. A U.S. Ranger trains in England and later sees action at the Dieppe landing (a rehearsal for D-Day two years later), while the famed British convoy to Malta, Operation Pedestal, is featured. Although the emphasis is on the fighting in North Africa, largely from an Allied perspective, the authors do a nice job with German intercepts of messages of an American military attach‚ in Cairo that provided valuable intelligence to the Axis, an incident that often goes unremarked upon. Churchill's meeting with Stalin in Moscow is followed by the British victory over the German Afrika Korps at El Alamein, with continuing emphasis on individual experiences. An epilogue covers the later careers of the individuals featured throughout the book, important political figures and generals as well as individual soldiers and airmen. In all, this account does a good job with a lesser-known period of the war, but it assumes the reader's interest, rather than creating it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The title of this book is taken from a speech by Churchill after the British finally defeated Rommel's Afrika Corps in October and November 1942, at El Alamein, the decisive battle in the struggle for North Africa. Up to that point, Britain had endured setback after setback. By the middle of 1942, all of the Mediterranean's northern shore and central bastions, save for Gibraltar and the beleaguered island of Malta, were lost. It seemed that the only place where Allied forces could "get at" the enemy was in North Africa; even there, Rommel, the "Desert Fox," had repeatedly frustrated British forces. Clayton and Craig are both authors and producers of television documentaries. They have extensively utilized first-person accounts of participants and weaved them together with original research into facets of the campaigns often neglected by scholars. The result is an absorbing chronicle of warfare that conveys the constant sense of tension and the occasional sense of exhilaration experienced by men in combat. Jay Freeman
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