Take These Men; Echoes of War

Leatherhead: Ashford, Buchan & Enright, 1993. Reprint. Trade paperback. Very good. x, 357, [1] pages. Includes Acknowledgments, Preface, Part One, 1940: Early Skirmishes; Part Two, 1940, An Army Destroyed; Part Three, 1941: Defying the Germans; Part Four, 1941: Defeating the Germans; Part Five, 1942: Eighth Army at Bay; Part Six, 1943: A Day's March Nearer Home. Lt Colonel Cyril Bencraft Joly MC (9 September 1918 - 2000) was a British Army officer who was educated at Sandhurst and joined the Royal Tank Regiment in 1939 and served throughout the Western Desert campaign, during which he was wounded and won the Military Cross and Bar. He served with 7th Armoured Division (Desert Rats) throughout the campaign in North Africa during World War II. He later served in North West Europe. He described his experiences as a tank commander in the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment (2 RTR) in Take These Men (1955), a (lightly fictionalized) personal narrative of the Western Desert campaign that is regarded as a classic of its kind. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Defeat of NATO. Few accounts of the tank battles in the Western Desert during the Second World War have provided so vivid an evocation of armoured warfare in such inhospitable conditions, warfare of a particularly difficult and dangerous kind. From 1940 to 1943 the battles raged back and forth, as one side or the other gained the upper hand, only to lose it again. For most of the time, the British armour (of which a great deal was obsolescent or plain obsolete) was either outnumbered by the Italians or outgunned by Rommel's Afrikakorps, while occasionally suffering the ineptitudes of higher command.