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A Year of Battle
Moorehead gives a superb evocation of the siege of the bravery of the sailors who risked everything to bring supplies to the town, as well as the famous ‘Rats of Tobruk’ – a German insult, adopted as a badge of pride by the Allied defenders. In the attack and counter-attack that raged from November to February 1942, Moorehead could see the superiority of Axis guns, tanks and ‘The cold fact was that somehow the British had to build a better army. And build it quickly.’ Elsewhere in the world, Allied fortunes were on a it seemed to many that India might fall to the Japanese, just as Singapore, Malaysia and Burma had done. Moorehead was sent to India to report on the burgeoning independence movement, and he provides a fascinating insight into the turbulent politics, through his talks with such key figures as Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah. In the desert, the storm of Rommel’s new offensive was gathering and Moorehead returned in time to witness the painful defeat at Tobruk, and the first battle of El Alamein in which the British ‘emerged from their blackest hour’.
- GenresHistoryWorld War II
290 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1943
19 people want to read
About the author
Alan Moorehead
97 books94 followersAlan Moorehead was lionised as the literary man of action: the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II; author of award winning books; star travel writer of The New Yorker; pioneer publicist of wildlife conservation. At the height of his success, his writing suddenly stopped and when, 17 years later, his death was announced, he seemed a heroic figure from the past. His fame as a writer gave him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Field Marshall Montgomery and the courtship and marriage of his beautiful wife Lucy Milner.
After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile, and finally, A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946, and died in 1983.
After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile, and finally, A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946, and died in 1983.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 20, 2020
A Year of Battle, The Year of Auchinleck (1941-1942) is the second volume in Alan Moorhead’s ‘Desert War trilogy’, and is just as well written and captivating as the first. This book deals with the campaigns of 1941-1942 after General Claude Auchinleck took over from General Archibald Wavell as Commander-in-Chief. It makes painful reading at times (for a Brit like me) because despite some successes the narrative ends in late summer 1942 after German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel had pushed the Eighth Army not only back into Egypt but all the way to El Alamein, only 60 miles from Alexandria. If the Germans hadn’t been as utterly exhausted as the British after continual fighting, they could have taken Egypt within a few days. As it was, they had to stop and, for the British, the El Alamein line was the best place for the fighting to stop. I won’t explain the reasons for this here.
Moorhead was Australian and had no over-polite British sensibilities holding him back, and he told many truths in his reporting and in this book about the shortcomings of the British armed forces and how they compared with the German Afrika Korps. Having said that, he earned the trust of the generals because he never took the simplistic view that they were to blame for the British failures, which came about as a result of many factors: the Germans generally had better tanks with more powerful guns; they were far more efficient in many areas that made their lives easier and kept them up to fighting strength; they had much better training and a more experienced officer corps and, perhaps most of all, they had thoroughly integrated their fighting forces. This meant that the Luftwaffe (air force), artillery, infantry, tanks and anti-tank guns all worked in harmony, to great effect. They were also very quick to react to setbacks, and more mobile on the battlefield. On the British side, cooperation steadily improved but it began with a good deal of inter-service rivalry, which did not help our cause.
Anyhow, back to the book. Moorhead had a wonderful way with words and his descriptions are effective and evocative. Owing to his access to Intelligence officers and generals he also had a good picture of the overall situation much of the time. This alone would not be enough to make his work great but he also had the gift/intelligence to marshal his thoughts and present them in a very coherent and edifying way. Reading this book, I really felt I understood what was happening and why things happened, even down to small details at the individual soldier’s level, something most histories are not able to portray in any sustained way.
During 1942 Moorhead also visited India and Palestine, and he describes events and the ways of life there, too. His summary of the political situation in India is particularly useful; it is succinct, clear and gives an excellent precis of the main Indian political parties, religions and their loyalties and objectives, and how the British were trying to persuade Indians to fight the Japanese before they would be able to envision Indian independence from the Empire. (This was not so much political blackmailing, by the way, but more about survival: if the Japanese had taken India, they could have secured the Far East and obtained vast resources that may have lost us the war or made it last years longer than it did. It would also have meant India would have been subjugated by the Japanese, and many people, possibly millions, would have died or suffered.) While there he met Gandhi and Nehru, as well as many lesser-known political figures. He also saw his old friend, General Wavell, who had been sent to India after leaving the Western Desert.
Then back to North Africa, and his job to report on the Desert War. In January 1942 the weather made life difficult. Here is an extract to give you an idea of Moorhead making you feel the misery of the soldiers:
Rain fell. The people in western Cyrenaica declared they had never seen such rain before. You might have expected them to say that since the weather is always believed to be worse in wartime – probably because the people are more exposed to it. Even so this was exceptional. Day after day heavy grey storm clouds hung over the Green Hills and drenched the countryside. Great hailstones came down, an almost unprecedented thing, and always to the south near Agedabia the front-line troops reported they had seen flakes of snow in the desert. … Everywhere the troops stood about huddled in their greatcoats and every bit of spare clothing they could lay hands upon. Some protected their faces with woollen balaclava helmets; others draped captured bivouac tents about their shoulders and went foraging through the deserted houses looking for firewood.
Convoys of motor vehicles crawled along the roads to the front, with painful, agonising slowness – the slowness that Lord Milne meant when he spoke of war as consisting of short periods of intense fear and long periods of intense boredom. They started out from the dry desert of Egypt and made an immense and dusty tour around the Halfaya positions where the enemy garrison was still holding out. When they regained the road again in Libya they ran into the rain and cold. The roads were jammed. For hours the vehicles stood still, thousands of vehicles, and there was nothing to do but sit and wait in the pouring rain for the blockage to be cleared. Wherever the enemy had blown the road the engineers and road gangs worked in the knee-deep red mud easing the vehicles through one by one over temporary bridges and half-finished bypasses. No-one on the road had any news. No-one seemed to know what was going on at the front. The journey from Cairo lengthened from four days to a week to two weeks and still the front line lay somewhere out in the remote and elusive horizon of the wet desert.
The quality of writing makes this a quick read for a history, despite all the military unit nomenclatures and place names. I have the Folio Society edition of the book and the endpapers have very useful maps, which are quick and easy to refer to, as well as numerous photographs in two sections.
I have read several books on the Desert War, including Rommel, the Desert Fox (Desmond Young), and Rommel’s War in Africa (Wolf Heckmann), both of which are very good, but Moorhead’s books are superior in the quality of the writing. I recommend this series wholeheartedly to anyone interested in the Desert War and in military history in general.
Moorhead was Australian and had no over-polite British sensibilities holding him back, and he told many truths in his reporting and in this book about the shortcomings of the British armed forces and how they compared with the German Afrika Korps. Having said that, he earned the trust of the generals because he never took the simplistic view that they were to blame for the British failures, which came about as a result of many factors: the Germans generally had better tanks with more powerful guns; they were far more efficient in many areas that made their lives easier and kept them up to fighting strength; they had much better training and a more experienced officer corps and, perhaps most of all, they had thoroughly integrated their fighting forces. This meant that the Luftwaffe (air force), artillery, infantry, tanks and anti-tank guns all worked in harmony, to great effect. They were also very quick to react to setbacks, and more mobile on the battlefield. On the British side, cooperation steadily improved but it began with a good deal of inter-service rivalry, which did not help our cause.
Anyhow, back to the book. Moorhead had a wonderful way with words and his descriptions are effective and evocative. Owing to his access to Intelligence officers and generals he also had a good picture of the overall situation much of the time. This alone would not be enough to make his work great but he also had the gift/intelligence to marshal his thoughts and present them in a very coherent and edifying way. Reading this book, I really felt I understood what was happening and why things happened, even down to small details at the individual soldier’s level, something most histories are not able to portray in any sustained way.
During 1942 Moorhead also visited India and Palestine, and he describes events and the ways of life there, too. His summary of the political situation in India is particularly useful; it is succinct, clear and gives an excellent precis of the main Indian political parties, religions and their loyalties and objectives, and how the British were trying to persuade Indians to fight the Japanese before they would be able to envision Indian independence from the Empire. (This was not so much political blackmailing, by the way, but more about survival: if the Japanese had taken India, they could have secured the Far East and obtained vast resources that may have lost us the war or made it last years longer than it did. It would also have meant India would have been subjugated by the Japanese, and many people, possibly millions, would have died or suffered.) While there he met Gandhi and Nehru, as well as many lesser-known political figures. He also saw his old friend, General Wavell, who had been sent to India after leaving the Western Desert.
Then back to North Africa, and his job to report on the Desert War. In January 1942 the weather made life difficult. Here is an extract to give you an idea of Moorhead making you feel the misery of the soldiers:
Rain fell. The people in western Cyrenaica declared they had never seen such rain before. You might have expected them to say that since the weather is always believed to be worse in wartime – probably because the people are more exposed to it. Even so this was exceptional. Day after day heavy grey storm clouds hung over the Green Hills and drenched the countryside. Great hailstones came down, an almost unprecedented thing, and always to the south near Agedabia the front-line troops reported they had seen flakes of snow in the desert. … Everywhere the troops stood about huddled in their greatcoats and every bit of spare clothing they could lay hands upon. Some protected their faces with woollen balaclava helmets; others draped captured bivouac tents about their shoulders and went foraging through the deserted houses looking for firewood.
Convoys of motor vehicles crawled along the roads to the front, with painful, agonising slowness – the slowness that Lord Milne meant when he spoke of war as consisting of short periods of intense fear and long periods of intense boredom. They started out from the dry desert of Egypt and made an immense and dusty tour around the Halfaya positions where the enemy garrison was still holding out. When they regained the road again in Libya they ran into the rain and cold. The roads were jammed. For hours the vehicles stood still, thousands of vehicles, and there was nothing to do but sit and wait in the pouring rain for the blockage to be cleared. Wherever the enemy had blown the road the engineers and road gangs worked in the knee-deep red mud easing the vehicles through one by one over temporary bridges and half-finished bypasses. No-one on the road had any news. No-one seemed to know what was going on at the front. The journey from Cairo lengthened from four days to a week to two weeks and still the front line lay somewhere out in the remote and elusive horizon of the wet desert.
The quality of writing makes this a quick read for a history, despite all the military unit nomenclatures and place names. I have the Folio Society edition of the book and the endpapers have very useful maps, which are quick and easy to refer to, as well as numerous photographs in two sections.
I have read several books on the Desert War, including Rommel, the Desert Fox (Desmond Young), and Rommel’s War in Africa (Wolf Heckmann), both of which are very good, but Moorhead’s books are superior in the quality of the writing. I recommend this series wholeheartedly to anyone interested in the Desert War and in military history in general.
December 31, 2025
I really rate Moorhead as a contemporary chronicler of World War Two, this being the second book of his I have read. Again, it’s just as much a travel book as a military account of war in the Middle East, which serves as a strength due to Moorehead’s vivid and rich descriptions of Cairo, Baghdad and India. He still manages to capture the true tension of frontline battle though, and his genuine exhilaration and fear are etched onto each page.
“Outside the street vendors came by, and the cries of the Cairo street vendors are just what you would expect them to be- entertaining and romantic in the evening and merely demnable in the early morning when you are trying to work. There was one man who brought such nameless pain and misery into voice that I was forced to open window to listen. He was selling bath mats”
“A tank among unarmed lorries is like a shark among mackerel”
“Outside the street vendors came by, and the cries of the Cairo street vendors are just what you would expect them to be- entertaining and romantic in the evening and merely demnable in the early morning when you are trying to work. There was one man who brought such nameless pain and misery into voice that I was forced to open window to listen. He was selling bath mats”
“A tank among unarmed lorries is like a shark among mackerel”
June 27, 2019
finished volumne number three - The End in Africa. A melancholy end to a long and bitter battle. The third time in in 50 years I have read his documentary of the war in North Africa. Moorehead was a great writer.
April 29, 2024
The reporting on the Rats of Tobruk and Al Alamein is the highlight of the 2nd volume in the trilogy. Moorehead's time in India is equally interesting, and he gets to spend time with the 3 key political figures - Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. The Cripps mission is also discussed in detail.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews