Pendulum Of War: Three Battles at El Alamein

"It is. Professor Barr as he now is—Dr Barr when he wrote that book as a relatively young historian—did it meticulously. It’s a book which takes the passion out of it—in a good way. He weighs the arguments, the evidence. He did research all round the world: he went to Australia, to New Zealand and he gathered all the archival material and weighed it up. Of the 300 books on El Alamein, some of them aren’t very good, but even the quite good ones are partisan. There are very few non-partisans on Alamein. Everybody has an opinion; a strong and emotional opinion. What Barr did was to demonstrate that it was possible to examine it while being fair to all sides—the two sides but also the various factions within each side who wanted to argue about who had won the bottle, who had lost the battle, whether it was important, whether it wasn’t important. I’m making it sound dry but it’s not because it’s wonderfully written. If you are looking for a book that will take you from the beginning of the campaign to the end of the campaign, with all the fighting in between explained to you, then Barr’s is absolutely the one to go to. It’s a book I admire enormously. It is, because it’s a human drama—it’s the highs and lows. The German offensive begins in late May 1942 and sweeps aside the British forces in the western desert. At the time, they were far to the west, in Libya. They collapse in Libya and have to retreat to Egypt—to flee, to be absolutely honest. Back, back and back they go. Tobruk, the great fortress city of Libya, falls: the garrison can’t hold it. The Germans come on and on and on. And then, the Commonwealth forces make a stand at the El Alamein position—and just about manage to stop the Germans breaking through. “World War II has created many things, but one of the most notable is an unending stream of cliché.” They don’t beat the Germans—all they manage to do is stop running away. Then there’s another battle—Alam el Halfa—where the Germans try and take the lines again and the British refuse to fight. They hold their line, saying, ‘We’re not going to come out and fight in the open desert because the Germans always beat us there.’ So it’s a great defensive victory. Then, finally, the British build up their forces and sweep forwards in the Battle of El Alamein itself, a great 13-day battle in which they crack the Germans on the battlefield. They then pursue them all the way to Tripoli. The end of the campaign is the capture of Tripoli on 23 January 1943, which had always been the aim of these battles—and that’s really the Germans out of Libya. Barr takes you right from Rommel rolling forward to Churchill taking the victory salute in Tripoli. It’s an incredible story and he tells it really well. Yes. There are virtually no landmarks. If you see photographs—and Niall Barr actually went a number of times and walked it himself, he has that kind of care for detail—it’s as flat as a pancake. You read about a feature that they’re fighting over, and then you find out it’s just 20 feet high, a convenience on the map. This is a very particular type of warfare that they’re fighting and you need a good eye for it. So there are those human stories. He’s also very good on the chain of command. King’s provides the staff officer training for the British Armed Forces, and so he works a lot with soldiers. You see what the junior officers are doing, what the middle-ranking officers are doing, and what the senior commanders are doing. It’s incredibly hard to do all that and make it explicable, and he does it triumphantly."