The Mediterranean and Middle East: British fortunes reach their lowest (Sept. 1941 to Sept. 1941)
Author: Ian Stanley Ord Playfair
Publisher:
Published: 1960
Total Pages: 584
ISBN-13:
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The Mediterranean and Middle East: British fortunes reach their lowest ebb (Sept. 1941 to Sept. 1942)
Author: Ian Stanley Ord Playfair
Publisher:
Published: 2004-09-01
Total Pages: 686
ISBN-13: 9781845740672
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis, the third of eight volumes in the 18-volume official British History of the Second World War, dealing with the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern theatres, describes the nadir of British fortunes in the region. Covering the year from September 1941 to September 1942, the book opens with the latest round in the ding-dong battle in North Africa with Operation Crusader , Britain s bid to relieve the besieged port of Tobruk and chase Rommel from the western desert. The authors emphasise how Britain was hampered by obsolescent equpiment such as the Crusader tank. Despite this, British, Australian and South African forces relieved Tobruk and entered Benghazi on Christmas Day 1941 - only to evacuate it after Rommel s swift recovery the following month. At sea, the Royal Navy suffered serious blows with the loss of Ark Royal and Barham and a daring Italian human torpedo attack on British ships in Alexandria harbour. Axis air attacks on Malta and convoys supplying it reached their peak in April, and the island was awarded the George Cross for its gallant defence. Rommel counter-attacked in the desert in May, defeating the Eighth Army at Gazala, and on June 21st Tobruk was lost. But the Axis attempt to take Cairo was stalled at the battle of Alam el Halfa, and after General Auchinleck was replaced by General Montgomery, the Allies prepared to go back on the offensive. With 11 appendices, 40 maps and diagrams and 40 photographs.
The First Victory
Author: Andrew Stewart
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-10-20
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 0300222203
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Exciting . . . a comprehensive account of an overlooked campaign in which an outnumbered imperial army destroyed Mussolini’s dream of a new Roman Empire.” —Ashley Jackson, author of Churchill Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, this is the story of the British and Commonwealth forces who, against all odds, completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent in 1941. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops. This compelling book draws on an array of previously unseen documents to provide both a detailed campaign history and a fresh appreciation of the first significant Allied success of the war. Andrew Stewart investigates such topics as Britain’s African wartime strategy; how the fighting forces were assembled (most from British colonies, none from the U.S.); General Archibald Wavell’s command abilities and his difficult relationship with Winston Churchill; the resolute Italian defense at Keren, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the entire war; the legacy of the campaign in East Africa; and much more. “The First Victory is that rarity of military history: groundbreaking research combined with first-rate narrative skills.” —Open Letters Includes maps and photographs
Struggle for the Middle Sea
Author: Vincent O'Hara
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2009-06-01
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 1612514081
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Mediterranean is the maritime crossroads where Europe, Asia, and Africa meet. More major naval actions were fought there than in the Atlantic or Pacific yet remarkably little has been written about the subject. Th is fresh study of the Mediterranean’s naval war analyzes the actions and performances of the five major navies—British, Italian, French, German, and American—during the entire five-year campaign and examines the national imperatives that drove each nation’s maritime strategy. Struggle for the Middle Sea provides a history of the entire campaign from all perspectives and covers Germany’s largely unknown—and remarkably successful—struggle to employ sea power in the Mediterranean after the Italian armistice. Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy (August 2009) has called it “a new and stunningly important view of World War II” and “a fabulously readable and important book.”
Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947
Author: Daniel Todman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-03-17
Total Pages: 993
ISBN-13: 0190658509
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe second volume of Daniel Todman's account of Great Britain and World War II The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947, begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war. Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world.
The Mediterranean Air War
Author: Robert S. Ehlers, Jr.
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2015-03-27
Total Pages: 536
ISBN-13: 0700620753
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWithout what the Allies learned in the Mediterranean air war in 1942–1944, the Normandy landings—and so, perhaps, the Second World War II—would have ended differently. This is one of many lessons of The Mediterranean Air War, the first one-volume history of the vital role of airpower during the three-year struggle for control of the Mediterranean Basin in World War II—and of its significance for the Allied successes in the war's last two years. Airpower historian Robert S. Ehlers opens his account with an assessment of the pre-war Mediterranean theater, highlighting the ways in which the players' strategic choices, strengths, and shortcomings set the stage for and ultimately shaped the air campaigns over the Middle Sea. Beginning with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, Ehlers reprises the developing international crisis—initially between Britain and Italy, and finally encompassing France, Germany, the US, other members of the British Commonwealth, and the Balkan countries. He then explores the Mediterranean air war in detail, with close attention to turning points, joint and combined operations, and the campaign's contribution to the larger Allied effort. In particular, his analysis shows how and why the success of Allied airpower in the Mediterranean laid the groundwork for combined-arms victories in the Middle East, the Indian Ocean area, North Africa, and the Atlantic, northwest Europe. Of grand-strategic importance from the days of Ancient Rome to the Great-Power rivalries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Middle Sea was no less crucial to the Allied forces and their foes. Here, in the successful offensives in North Africa in 1942 and 1943, the US and the British learned to conduct a coalition air and combined-arms war. Here, in Sicily and Italy in 1943 and 1944, the Allies mastered the logistics of providing air support for huge naval landings and opened a vital second aerial front against the Third Reich, bombing critical oil and transportation targets with great effectiveness. The first full examination of the Mediterranean theater in these critical roles—as a strategic and tactical testing ground for the Allies and as a vital theater of operations in its own right—The Mediterranean Air War fills in a long-missing but vital dimension of the history of World War II.
In Passage Perilous
Author: Vincent P. O'Hara
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2012-11-05
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 0253006058
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn invaluable account of one of the most overlooked sea battles of World War II. By mid-1942 the Allies were losing the Mediterranean war: Malta was isolated and its civilian population faced starvation. In June 1942 the British Royal Navy made a stupendous effort to break the Axis stranglehold. The British dispatched armed convoys from Gibraltar and Egypt toward Malta. In a complex battle lasting more than a week, Italian and German forces defeated Operation Vigorous, the larger eastern effort, and ravaged the western convoy, Operation Harpoon, in a series of air, submarine, and surface attacks culminating in the Battle of Pantelleria. Just two of seventeen merchant ships that set out for Malta reached their destination. In Passage Perilous presents a detailed description of the operations and assesses the actual impact Malta had on the fight to deny supplies to Rommel’s army in North Africa. The book’s discussion of the battle’s operational aspects highlights the complex relationships between air and naval power and the influence of geography on littoral operations. “An important and highly recommended addition to the literature on World War II in the Mediterranean.” —IPP Naval Maritime History
War of Shadows
Author: Gershom Gorenberg
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-01-19
Total Pages: 475
ISBN-13: 1610396286
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this World War II military history, Rommel's army is a day from Cairo, a week from Tel Aviv, and the SS is ready for action. Espionage brought the Nazis this far, but espionage can stop them—if Washington wakes up to the danger. As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets. Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began. War of Shadows is the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.
Raising Churchill's Army
Author: David French
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2001-07-05
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 0191608262
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first serious analysis of the combat capability of the British army in the Second World War. It sweeps away the myth that the army suffered from poor morale, and that it only won its battles thorugh the use of 'brute force' and by reverting to the techniques of the First World War. David French analyses the place of the army in British strategy in the interwar period and during the Second World War. He shows that after 1918 the General Staff tried hard to learn the lessons of the First World War, enthusiastically embracing technology as the best way of minimizing future casualties. In the first half of the Second World War the army did suffer from manifold weaknesses, not just in the form of shortages of equipment, but also in the way in which it applied its doctrine. Few soldiers were actively eager to close with the enemy, but the morale of the army never collapsed and its combat capability steadily improved from 1942 onwards. Professor French assesses Montgomery's contributions to the war effort and concludes that most important were his willingness to impose a uniform understanding of doctrine on his subordinates, and to use mechanized firepower in ways quite different from Haig in the First World War.
Royal Artillery in the Second World War
Author: Richard Doherty
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2016-07-22
Total Pages: 455
ISBN-13: 0750979313
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the Second World War, the Germans considered the Royal Artillery to be the most professional arm of the British Army: British gunners were accurate, effective and efficient, and provided fire support for their armoured and infantry colleagues that was better than that in any other army. However, the Royal Artillery delivered much more than field and medium artillery battlefield support. Gunner regiments manned antitank guns on the front line and light anti-aircraft guns in divisional regiments to defend against air attack at home and abroad. The Royal Artillery also helped to protect convoys that brought essential supplies to Britain, and AA gunners had their finest hour when they destroyed the majority of the V-1 flying bombs launched against Britain from June 1944. Richard Doherty delves into the wide-ranging role of the Royal Artillery, examining its state of preparedness in 1939, the many developments that were introduced during the war – including aerial observation and self-propelled artillery – the growth of the regiment and its effectiveness in its many roles. Royal Artillery in the Second World War is a comprehensive account of a British Army regiment that played a vital role in the ensuing Allied victory.
