"This
is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
— Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942
Spring 1942. Throughout
the world, the Allies retreat before the inexorable march
of Fascism: Singapore falls to Japan; the Wehrmacht lays siege
to Leningrad, captures the Crimea, and advances on Stalingrad;
Greece and Yugoslavia fall to the Nazis; the American Pacific
Fleet lies in ruins; and in Libya, Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps
faces off against the British Eighth Army. Over the next twenty
weeks, a series of battles fought in North Africa's Western
Desert will become the pivot point of the Second World War.
In part, The
End of the Beginning is the story of those battles: Rommel's
surprise attack on the Gazala Line in May 1942, the fighting
retreat of the British Eighth Army under General Sir Claude
Auchinleck, and the fall of Tobruk after a siege lasting 240
days; the blockade of Malta and the Pedestal convoy that finally
relieved the island; Auchinleck's brilliant last-ditch battle
to hold Rommel at El Alamein, Rommel's final attacks at Alam
Halfa Ridge, and then Montgomery's destruction of the Afrika
Korps at the second battle of El Alamein in November.
But, like the best
works of popular history, The End of the Beginning
is more than a simple chronicle of battles won and lost, of
the decisions of statesmen and generals. Its stories are told
from the perspectives of the men and women who spent these
pivotal months on the very tip of the Allied spear, with raw,
personal experience documented on virtually every page: Peter
Vaux, the intelligence officer of the British 7th Armoured
Division, plotting the defeat of the Afrika Korps in a desert
wadi named El Alamein; American merchant marine cadet Lonnie
Dales sailing in the Pedestal convoy in an attempt to relieve
Malta and, after his ship is sunk, volunteering to man the
antiaircraft gun on the crippled oil tanker Ohio; Flight Lieutenant
Ken Lee flying ground support missions by day, exploring the
fleshpots of Alexandria by night; Alex Szima from Dayton,
Ohio, one of Darby's original Rangers, joining the Canadians
in the failed raid on Dieppe, and probably becoming the first
American to kill a German during the war; Mimi Cortis, a Maltese
nurse in one of the island's supply-starved hospitals. These
stories give an unmatched depth to the consequences of the
disputes between Churchill and his senior commanders; the
shuttle diplomacy between London, Washington, and Moscow by
FDR confidant Harry Hopkins; the deep conflicts between Montgomery
and his predecessors; and the extraordinary American intelligence
blunder that betrayed the Eighth Army's plans to Rommel.
Showcasing the
latest scholarship and the authors' own original research,
packed with edge-of-the-seat first-person experiences, and
intercut with the pace of popular fiction, The End of
the Beginning is an extraordinary assessment of one of
the most important campaigns of the Second World War.
Tim Clayton is a former research fellow at
Worcester College, Oxford, and the author of numerous articles
and books, including The English Print, 1688-1802.
He has also worked as a writer and producer of television
documentaries, including Voices in the Dark, a film
about the historian Carlo Ginzburg.
Phil Craig,
a classmate of Clayton's at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge,
is a producer of television documentaries. Clayton and Craig
collaborated on Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain.
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