The Desert War: The Classic Trilogy on the North African Campaign 1940-43

"This is probably the best book about World War II. Moorehead was the Daily Express’s war correspondent for the Desert War. Each year—1942, 1943, 1944—he wrote up one of these books and they were then put together in 1944 in their classic form as the African Trilogy . Moorehead was a great journalist, a great travel-writer, and a fantastic historian. When you combine those, the prose is beautiful. In a way, he is telling exactly the same story that Barr does, but the difference is that now it’s a work of passion—by somebody who was there and who was intimately involved. He knew the people. “ I can’t think of a book to come out of World War II which is more compelling and enjoyable to read.” I would say Moorehead is a bit like Gibbon: you don’t actually have to agree with his judgements and why would you? There’s been a lot of history since he wrote this. But you can’t replace the immediacy. You can pick up Moorehead knowing nothing. You just need to know something is happening and there’s this fantastic writer who is going to take you through it with passion. He evokes the places, the smells, the sights and the people so well. Most books sound better when you talk about them than when you read them. Moorehead is much better to read than to hear me talk about it because Moorehead really was a genius. There just happened to be a genius in the right place at the right time. I can’t think of a book to come out of World War II which is more compelling and enjoyable to read. It’s a highpoint of war literature. The one thing that Moorehead missed was the Battle of El Alamein. He was a desert correspondent from 1940 and, by 1942, he was tiring. He didn’t really want to go back in May 1942 and when the campaign began he was in India. He then went back and covered it up until the moment that Churchill sacked the commanders in Egypt in August 1942. At that point, they had managed to hold off the Germans and the Italians and Churchill arrives in Cairo and says, ‘You’re a bunch of losers, we’ve given you all this stuff and you haven’t been able to beat the Germans and Italians. I’m going to get rid of you and bring in a new team.’ At that stage, Moorehead was on his way out. He made his notes in Cairo before leaving but he really wrote the book in America. “You can pick up Moorehead knowing nothing.” So an odd exclusion of El Alamein is that there is no great journalistic literature— because the key chronicler had left. The story picks up with him returning to North Africa, to Algiers, in the spring of 1943. He starts off by saying that a great victory has been won. And then it kicks off. But the people he knew and was intimately concerned with were the ones who were sacked or killed in the summer of 1942. The characters around which the book is built are not the newcomers, they’re the old team whom he’d known from 1940 onwards. That intimacy makes it fantastic. The best desert general up until that point—a man called Gott—is killed in an air crash. He’s flying back from the desert to Cairo to meet Churchill and he’s shot down. That’s the end of that bit of the book, his death. So it really is elegiac. The African Trilogy , as finally published, knows all this is going to happen. Though he wrote it up as it went along, he is writing it just after the events. He knows they’re going to die. The Nazis don’t invade North Africa, the Fascists do. Essentially, Mussolini stayed out of World War II until Hitler had crushed France and he was sure the British and French were going to lose. Then he says, ‘I’m in!’ So, in June 1940, the war begins. Libya is an Italian colony—and they launch an invasion of Egypt from Libya. That’s what kicks it all off. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Germans only arrive in the spring of 1941, almost a year later. The Italians are doing so badly in the war that Hitler and his generals fear Italy might collapse or leave the war. This would undermine the idea of an Axis and might set off unpredictable consequences. So they decide to support Mussolini in three main ways. One is that they send the Luftwaffe into the Mediterranean to give air support. Secondly, they send submarines into the Mediterranean to interdict British supply routes. And, last and least—but most memorably—they send a land army to fight in North Africa: Rommel with the Afrika Korps. That’s why they’re all there. But a lot has happened since June 1940. They’ve been banging away. Once you have a war going, you’ve got to fight it."