Alamein: Great Battles

Great Battles

by Simon Ball

El Alamein was one of the pivotal battles of the Second World War, fought by armies and air forces on the cutting edge of military technology. Yet Alamein has always had a patchy reputation - with many commentators willing to knock its importance.
This book explains just why El Alamein is such a controversial battle. Based on an intensive reading of the contemporary sources, in particular the extensive and recently declassified British bugging of Axis prisoners of war, military historian Simon Ball turns Alamein on its head, explaining it as a cultural defeat for Britain.
Alamein is a military history of the battle - showing how different it looks stripped of later cultural excrescences. But it also shows how 'Alamein culture' saturated the post-war world, when archival sources mingled with film, novels, magazines, popular histories, and the rest of Alamein's footprint.
Whether you are interested in the battle itself or its cultural afterlife, if you have an opinion about Alamein, you'll question it after reading this book.

Genres: World War II

248 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2016

Reviews

[Martin Samuels]

Simon Ball, who teaches at the University of Leeds, has written an excellent and somewhat unexpected book. Unexpected, because this is not a book that describes the course of the battle (as Ball notes, there are a dozen official histories and perhaps 300 other books that already do this), but is instead an examination of the many different perspectives and uses to which the battle has been subjected. In particular, he notes how the battle was, almost from the start, almost deliberately forgotten, and instead used as a means to explore the relative importance of the battles that took place during the summer of 1942, or to burnish the fame of the commanders who were defeated, or to underline the greater importance of air forces compared to land forces, or to draw comparisons with the titanic stuggle taking place at Stalingrad at the same time. Indeed, as Ball concludes, although there has been an enormous amount of attention directed at Alamein, very little is actually about the battle and much of it seeks to play down its importance. Even Churchill delayed the ringing of church bells to celebrate the victory until after the Allied Torch landings at the other end of North Africa. These very different perspectives, and the clear and engaging style with which Ball brings his account together, make this a fascinating and very different study of a battle, which makes a significant contribution to the literature - far more so than would have been the case had he simply produced yet another account of the flow of operations.