Desert War: The North African Campaign 1940-43

I bought this book in 2023 because I still remembered reading and liking it long ago in the 1960s, at the age of 12 or 13. I didn't know what I'd make of it now, especially as the war in North Africa is not a subject that I find intrinsically fascinating; I think I've read no other books about it.

However, I still find this one both impressive and remarkably readable. Alan Moorehead (1910–1983) was a war correspondent during the war, his job being to follow the action as closely as possible and report on it. In the book, he summarizes the military strategy and tactics of the conflict in a comprehensible way, but the peculiar strength of the book is the constant narrative of his personal experiences as he follows the soldiers around, getting a taste of some of their hardships and dangers.

He's very observant, and has the knack of writing down his observations clearly, completely, in detail, in a way that's somehow never boring. He often finds something bizarre to comment on.

His prose doesn't seem old-fashioned in general, but I'm occasionally reminded that he was writing in a different age, as when he now and then uses the word ‘gay' in its original sense, without any premonition that it might come to mean something else. Or when he uses the word ‘natives' to refer to the local people of the area in which he finds himself. This is of course literally correct, they are the natives, the people who were born there (just as Moorehead was a native of Australia and I'm a native of England); but these days it's become a word that people are more reluctant to use.

As he's a thoughtful man, it seems a little odd that he never mentions how lucky he is to be a war correspondent rather than a soldier. He experiences real hardships and dangers, and could easily have been killed or wounded on many occasions; and yet of course he always avoided enemy fire as best he could, whereas the soldiers had to advance into it. Sometimes he lived in conditions similar to theirs, but on average he lived in greater comfort and security than they did, and was able to see his wife and infant son occasionally. He was surely better informed than they were about what was going on in general; he talked to the generals as well as to the ordinary soldiers, and it was his business to be informed.

My standard rating here would be three stars, because I liked the book but don't expect to reread it often. However, for the time being I'll give it four stars because it impressed me as a fine piece of non-fiction writing. I won't give it five stars because that's only for top favourites, which in most cases I reread often.