Author : Patrick Delaforce
Publisher :
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 10,89 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN :
The 7th Armoured Division - the Desert Rats - was the most famous British fighting formation of World War Two, and the Division remains a household name to this day. This book covers the Desert Rats' early name-making campaigns, particularly their deployment in the vitally important North African theatre.
Author : Allen Packwood
Publisher : Grub Street Publishers
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 13,27 MB
Release : 2018-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1473893917
An analytical investigation into Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision-making process during every stage of World War II. When Winston Churchill accepted the position of Prime Minister in May 1940, he insisted in also becoming Minister of Defence. This, though, meant that he alone would be responsible for the success or failure of Britain’s war effort. It also meant that he would be faced with many monumental challenges and utterly crucial decisions upon which the fate of Britain and the free world rested. With the limited resources available to the UK, Churchill had to pinpoint where his country’s priorities lay. He had to respond to the collapse of France, decide if Britain should adopt a defensive or offensive strategy, choose if Egypt and the war in North Africa should take precedence over Singapore and the UK’s empire in the East, determine how much support to give the Soviet Union, and how much power to give the United States in controlling the direction of the war. In this insightful investigation into Churchill’s conduct during the Second World War, Allen Packwood, BA, MPhil (Cantab), FRHistS, the Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, enables the reader to share the agonies and uncertainties faced by Churchill at each crucial stage of the war. How Churchill responded to each challenge is analyzed in great detail and the conclusions Packwood draws are as uncompromising as those made by Britain’s wartime leader as he negotiated his country through its darkest days.
Author : Patrick Delaforce
Publisher : Sutton Publishing
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 23,49 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN :
The 7th Armoured Division was widely recognized as being the most powerful in Europe during World War II. Its emblem of a scarlet desert rat became famous throughout the British Army and to the war-torn British public as a symbol of heroism in their time of need. This volume sees the Desert Rats fighting in North Africa, Burma, Sicily and Italy. Their bravery is relived through the words of the combatant soldiers - the author has interviewed troopers, gunners and infantrymen to tell this story of Churchill's favourite division.
Author : George Forty
Publisher : Air Sea Media
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 34,75 MB
Release : 2014-06-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0957691556
70 years ago, on 7 June 1944, the British 7th Armored Division landed in Normandy, halfway through a wartime journey that had started in north Africa. Formed on 16 February 1940, it adopted the Jerboa as its divisional signÑand while many units that fought in the desert call themselves by the name, 7th Armoured Division are the original ÔDesert RatsÕ. The division helped destroy the Italian Tenth Army at Beda Fomm on 7 February 1941, defeat the Desert?FoxÑRommelÑat El Alamein in October 1942, and drive Axis forces out of North?Africa. After the desert, 7th Armored Division landed at Salerno on 15 September 1943, in time to help repulse concerted German counterattacks, beforeÑas part of U.S. Fifth ArmyÕs British X CorpsÑit took Naples and crossed the Volturno. Pulled out of Italy, it reached England in January 1944 where it prepared to enter the Northwestern European theater at Gold Beach from 7 June, equipped with the new Cromwell and the Sherman Firefly. The division had difficulties in Normandy, particularly at Villers-Bocage, and suffered the ignominy of having its GOCÑGeorge ErskineÑand a number of officers sacked and moved to other positions. Erskine was replaced by Gerald Lloyd Verney on 4 August 1944. He helped reinstill confidence and discipline to the division which took part in the Allied liberation of France and Belgium, entering Ghent in September. Verney was, in turn, replaced by Lewis Lyne in November 1944 and Lyne led the division on their final advance through Holland and into Germany. The Desert Rats ended the war with the liberation of Hamburg on 3 May 1945 after one of the most remarkable military journeys in history and was chosen to take part in the Allied victory parade held in Berlin on 21 July 1945. Winston Churchill recognized the achievements of the division when he spoke at the opening of a soldiersÕ club in Berlin: ÔDear Desert Rats! May your glory ever shine! May your laurels never fade! May the memory of this glorious pilgrimage of war which you have made from Alamein, via the Baltic to Berlin never die!Õ Desert Rats at War is an evocation of what it was like to serve with the division, in the African desert and Europe, from the first encounters by the Mobile Force in 1940 to Berlin in 1945. Full of eyewitness accounts and private photos, Desert Rats at War has been completely revised and updated, with additional text, maps and photographs.
Author : Patrick Delaforce
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,46 MB
Release : 2003
Category : World War, 1939-1945
ISBN : 9780750931984
No division has contributed more to the downfall of the Axis Powers and to the total defeat of Germany. The Desert Rats saw service in the Middle East when Italy declared war on us in 1940. They fought with great distinction all through the long campaign which culminated in the victory of Alamein. They took a leading part in the pursuit of Rommel's defeated forces and in the final breakthrough to Tunis. The division was the first British Armoured Division to land in Europe when it took part in the assault landing at Salerno. It served through the Italian campaign till brought back to England early in 1944 to prepare the great assault on Western Europe. So wrote the GOC of the Desert Rats, Major General L.O. Lyne, in Berlin during the Allied victory parades. The Desert Rats, the 7th Armoured Division, wore its famous insignia of the jerboa, the long-tailed rodent, with pride. The 7th, the most famous British formation of World War II, was Winston Churchill's favourite.
Author : John Parker
Publisher : Headline
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 10,78 MB
Release : 2013-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1472202627
In the recent war in Iraq, the 7th Armoured Brigade, bearers of the Desert Rats insignia, was immediately engaged in some of the fiercest early fighting, ultimately taking Basra for the Allies. The war in Iraq revived public focus on the Desert Rats whose famous battles of World War II helped turn the tide of German dominance. After World War II the Desert Rats re-emerged as part of the NATO forces during the Cold War years, and in other major deployments in the 1991 Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo. In this latest of his military histories, John Parker once again draws heavily on the drama of first-hand accounts for a story that is a seminal part of modern military history.
Author : Fitzroy MaClean
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 25,68 MB
Release : 2015-05-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0241973252
Fitztroy Maclean was one of the real-life inspirations for super-spy James Bond. After adventures in Soviet Russia before the war, Maclean fought with the SAS in North Africa in 1942. There he specialised in hair-raising commando raids behind enemy lines, including the daring and outrageous kidnapping of the German Consul in Axis-controlled Iraq. Maclean's extraordinary adventures in the Western Desert and later fighting alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia are blistering reading and show what it took to be a British hero who broke the mould . . .
Author : Jonathan Fennell
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 967 pages
File Size : 34,24 MB
Release : 2019-01-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1107030951
Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.
Author : Anthony Rogers
Publisher : History Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,29 MB
Release : 2017-02
Category : Leros, Battle of, Greece, 1943
ISBN : 9780750968355
In autumn 1943 the Italian-held Dodecanese was the setting for the last decisive German invasion of the Second World War - and the last irreversible British defeat. After the Italian armistice that followed the downfall of Mussolini, Churchill seized the opportunity to open a new front in the eastern Mediterranean, thereby increasing the pressure against Germany and hoping to provide an incentive for Turkey to join the Allies. Rejected by the Americans, it was a strategy fraught with difficulties and doomed to fail. Spearheaded by the LRDG and SBS, British troops were dispatched to the Aegean with naval units, but little or no air cover. They were opposed by German assault troops with overwhelming air superiority. Within 3 months, German forces had seized nearly all of the Dodecanese, which was occupied until the end of the war.
Author : Winston Churchill
Publisher :
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 35,26 MB
Release : 1915
Category : Fashoda Crisis, 1898
ISBN :
