The Iran-Iraq War. Volume 1: The Battle For Khuzestan, September 1980-May 1982

Middle East@War #23

by E.R. Hooton, Tom Cooper, Farzin Nadimi

The Iran-Iraq War was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century and accidentally created the current nightmare of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. There have been many books on the conflict, but this is the first detailed military history using materials from both sides, as well as materials obtained from US intelligence circles and British governmental archives. It provides a unique insight into a war which began through miscalculation and rapidly escalated into the longest conventional conflict in the post-Second World War era. The first volume looks at the background and describes in detail how Saddam Hussein decided to invade, but hamstrung, the Iraqi Army to restrict its greatest success to a narrow strip of territory in Iran s southern province of Khuzestan. This left the Iraqis unable to either advance or withdraw, and exposed them to ever greater and more successful Iranian counter-strokes which drove them out in May 1982 in the ferocious Battle of Khorramshahr."

Genres: Military History

112 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2017

About the author

E.R. (Ted) Hooton is a retired defence journalist who worked for Moench and Jane’s before establishing his own successful newsletter. A member of the Royal United Services Institute and the British Commission for Military History since retirement he has focused upon military history.

Reviews

[James Yee · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading Pierre Razoux's fabulous "The Iran-Iraq War", I was looking for a more photographic history of the conflict so I picked up all four volumes of this series.

The volumes do help supplement Razoux's book as I did come away with additional insights from the conflict. Lots of pictures like I was hoping for. So why the dismal rating for Volume 1? Well, I must have had a 1st edition print or something. But it was like the font they used to publish the book didn't have the '-' character. So whenever the author mentioned a range of numbers, the dash was always missing so you had to infer what the range was based on the context. For example, if he meant to say "200-300 tanks" it was published as "200300 tanks." And this wasn't just a few isolated typos, the entire book was that way whenever he was giving ranges of numbers.

The other complaint I have is that if you're going to go into details about battle plans, it would be nice if they provided and referred to specific maps to link it together. Instead you get a hodge podge of maps mixed in with the photos, but you never know if the text is referring to any of the maps.

Volumes 2 & 3 don't have the missing dash in the font, so they're more readable but they still suffer from the lack of useful map info.

I haven't read Volume 4 yet as that's focused on "forgotten fronts." But volumes 1-3 basically cover the entire war, so the last volume is probably just going to be of interest to people really interested in the war.