End of the Beginning - Softcover

Craig, Phil; Clayton, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340766816 ISBN 13: 9780340766811

Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks, 2003

Synopsis

1942 - British troops are stranded in the desert, struggling to hold back Rommel's Afrika Corps. Hitler's armies have reached Moscow, and there are murmurs of discontent at home as new doubts emerge about Churchill's leadership. Elsewhere in Europe there is chilling evidence of the mounting persecution of the Jews, stretching from Poland to the Channel Islands. For many, it seems there is little hope. As in their acclaimed bestseller FINEST HOUR, the authors use the personal testimony of ordinary people to tell the story of the war at a moment of great crisis. In END OF THE BEGINNING we meet again some of the people first encountered in FINEST HOUR, and get to know many more. Troops fighting for Montgomery in the desert, RAF pilots bombing German towns, a young Jewish woman deported to Auschwitz from Guernsey, the reality of the Home Front - these stories and many more paint a vivid picture of human endeavour in time of war. And, sixty years on from the Battle of Alamein, END OF THE BEGINNING tells the controversial truth about one of the most famous battles in history - the importance of its lesser-known predecessor and the months of bitter in-fighting between the Allied generals. With precision and compassion, Phil Craig and Tim Clayton again debunk the myths and explore the realities of a crucial year in the history of Britain.

About this title

Review

In End of the Beginning Tim Clayton and Phil Craig use the same techniques of oral history employed for their previous book. Finest Hour described the events of the first full year of the Second World War, 1940, highlighting the drama of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain by telling the story largely though the testimony of those who were there. End of the Beginning traces the desperate days from May to November 1942, as Rommel swept through north Africa in a seemingly unstoppable drive towards Cairo, only to be finally halted and defeated by Montgomery's Eighth Army. The story of the desert war has been told often enough, most recently in John Bierman's and Colin Smith's excellent Alamein: War Without Hate, but the use of oral testimony makes End of the Beginning a particularly vivid account. It's one thing to read a historian's bird's eye perspective on battle and quite another to follow, for example, a particular gun-crew in the desert as they struggle to make sense of the seeming chaos surrounding them.

The focus of End of the Beginning is always on north Africa, as indeed was the attention of Churchill and his generals at the time, but the authors also find room to record the experiences of both combatants and non-combatants elsewhere. A nurse working in a hospital on the besieged island of Malta. A US soldier caught up in the fiasco that was the raid on Dieppe. A young woman involved in the briefing of RAF bomber crews flying from airfields in Yorkshire. The strength of this often powerful and moving book lies in the glimpses it offers of ordinary men and women obliged to do their best in extraordinary, and bloody, times. --Nick Rennison

Review

This is a splendid book, well worth reading along with official histories, for it puts many of the facts into the experiences of ordinary men and women caught up in an unwanted but neccessary war. (Yorkshire Gazette & Herald)

An impressive range of interviews with survivors. Their "you are there" technique works powerfully in conveying the gut-wrenching fear of facing Rommel in the turet of a tank, or trying to evade a Stuka attack while manoeuvring an ammunition-packed merchantman en route to beseiged Malta. (The Sunday Times)

They are accomplished listeners and have blended together eyewitness accounts to produce an exciting narrative. (Daily Mail)

Praise for FINEST HOUR: 'Brilliant...should form part of the National Curriculum.' (Daily Mail)

a remarkable story of determined, against-the-odds resistance...you have to search long and hard to find one with this kind of richness in the reporting and craftsmanship in the telling. (Chicago Herald Tribune)

From fighter pilots risking their lives in the skies above England, to squaddies stranded at Dunkirk, to schoolgirls sent abroad to Canada (the book is worth buying just for Bess Walder's account of horror and redemption aboard the City of Benares), this is riveting. (Sunday Express)

Personally compelling and politically revealing. (New York Times)

Compelling...Mesmerising stuff. (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0340766816
• ISBN 13: 9780340766811
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448