After collaborating on the documentary film series Finest Hour
and its companion book, Clayton and Craig return with this chronicle of the Allies' travails during the dark year of 1942. They begin with an introduction that describes major wartime figures, as well as a number of veterans who appear throughout the book, including British tank officer Peter Vaux. Events at the highest command levels, involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Allied generals, leaven tales of battle action that feature the veterans' accounts. Action at Knightsbridge Box (an important British position) and Bir Hakim (held by the Free French), for example, cuts to a nurse's experiences on the island of Malta, under aerial siege by the Axis, and those of an RAF pilot in action in the Middle East. A U.S. Ranger trains in England and later sees action at the Dieppe landing (a rehearsal for D-Day two years later), while the famed British convoy to Malta, Operation Pedestal, is featured. Although the emphasis is on the fighting in North Africa, largely from an Allied perspective, the authors do a nice job with German intercepts of messages of an American military attaché in Cairo that provided valuable intelligence to the Axis, an incident that often goes unremarked upon. Churchill's meeting with Stalin in Moscow is followed by the British victory over the German Afrika Korps at El Alamein, with continuing emphasis on individual experiences. An epilogue covers the later careers of the individuals featured throughout the book, important political figures and generals as well as individual soldiers and airmen. In all, this account does a good job with a lesser-known period of the war, but it assumes the reader's interest, rather than creating it. (Mar. 11)
