Welcome
Thanks for looking in. As many of you are no doubt aware, BBC Radio 4’s award winning investigative history series Document, presented by foreign affairs reporter Mike Thomson, has a brilliantly simple format. It unearths some overlooked piece of written ev-idence to shed new light on the kind of events that once sparked front page headlines. Along with Sir Max Hastings, Robert Paxton, the American historian who established Vichy’s enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis, and Jean Louis Cremieux-Brihac, one of de Gaulle’s wartime aides, I am participating in a Document programme on Vichy. The document in question involves among others Sir Stewart Menzies, wartime head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, and an emissary from Vichy France. If you want to know more the programme is scheduled for 19 March, 8pm London time.
As well as the Phoenix paperback edition my England’s Last War Against France - Fighting Vichy 1940-42 is also available as an eBook as, indeed, are most of my other titles. Amazon’s extraordinary marketing campaign for their Kindle, which started about a month before Christmas, has certainly succeeded in creating an appetite for them. Macmillan is about to bring out an eBook edition of Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion, the biography of this eccentric that is in the provsss of being tu5ned into a film.
Jerboa Press has reissued as an eBook (with a splendid new cover by David Maclaurin) my historical novel PALESTINE 1917, first published in 1991 by Sinclair-Stevenson under the title The Last Crusade. Set during against the backcloth of General Allenby’s First World War campaign to capture Jerusalem from the Kaiser’s Turkish allies it appeared in both hardback and paperback editions and was well reviewed. ‘’Excitingly told, moving, complex and rather challenging,’ said the Sunday Times. And the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The battle scenes are terrific.’
In December Penguin, which for some time has been selling an eBook as well as a paperback edition of Singapore Burning, published the main battle extract from Alamein: War Without Hate as one of their increasingly popular eBook Shorts, a series well received in the Spectator by writer and film maker Marcus Berkmann, one of their regular reviewers. Berkmann admitted he loathed the idea of eBooks until he was sent a free Kobo eReader ‘complete with Penguin’s new range of dedicated eBooks ‘ He reported that Alamein and Saul David’s Zulu war battle of Insandlwana ‘both sit very happily on the Kobo’ alongside a novella by Anita Brookner and a childhood recollections of Dublin by Colm Tobin. Down loading them from Amazon costs £1.99 each and they are usually about the equivalent of 70 pages of paperback.
I topped and tailed the Penguin Shorts extract of Alamein with an introduction and epilogue. The original book (written with John Bierman) and available as a Penguin paperback since 2003 was, as Sir John Keegan noted in a laudatory review, ‘nothing less than a narrative of the whole war on the southern Mediterranean shore from 1940 to 1943’. The sub-title ‘War Without Hate’ was taken from Erwin Rommel’s unpublished memoir and is reference to the chivalry often displayed by both sides.
Anniversaries
For three of my World War Two military histories 2012 is a year of significant 70th anniversaries at which the youngest of the veterans who commemorate them will be, in their late eighties. First it is the turn of those old soldiers, sailors and airmen who had the awful luck to be caught up in what was the most humiliating defeat in British military history followed by brutal and capricious Japanese captivity. In 42 months of durance vile hardly a day went by when at least one of their fellows was not the victim of some sadistic atrocity.
Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. 'The worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,' Churchill called it. About 120,000 prisoners were taken, a third of them British and the rest Australian and Indian. In private the prime minister' expressed his doubts about their fighting spirit. ‘They should have done better,' he told his friend Violet Bonham-Carter the liberal politician and writer.
Undoubtedly there were instances of panic and rank cowardice. Australia's prime minister John Curtin sent a cable to British Sith East Asia Supremo Archibald Wavell advising him that the death penalty must not be imposed on Australian soldiers without the approval of his government. This did not stop at least one Australian deserter being shot dead by a British officer as he attempted to board evacuating civilians from Singapore harbour.
Singapore Burning
Yet during the six weeks campaign down the Malay peninsula dogged resistance was displayed by all the nationalities defending it, the Australians entering the fray ith a devastating ambush. There were also moments of great valour. Between the army, navy and air force collected four Victoria Crosses - two of them posthumously, one to the captain a commandeered Yangste river boat. who rammed a Japanese troopship.
The swiftness of the British defeat can mostly be blamed on hubris. Never was an enemy so carelessly underestimated as the Japanese. They thought they were better than their Asian opponents in every way: better equipped, better trained and obviously better suited for modern warfare. They even thought their eye sight made them better airmen. Then in the first 24 hours of hostilities Japanese aircraft sank in 90 minutes the two battleships sent to remind Tokyo who ruled the waves and went on to establish total air supremacy. Beneath this formidable umbrella their dour infantry glided on bicycles along roads from which their enemy had sometimes been scattered by the only tanks in Malaya. The British had not thought them necessary.
Alamein
Towards the end of 1942 the tide was at last turning with Britain’s first major victory over sizeable German land forces at the battle named after a coastal railway stop in Egypt’s Western Desert. The anniversary of the victory at El Alamein is normally celebrated on the 23rd `October but this was only the start of the battle. It took 12 days for Montgomery, despite numerical superiority in guns and tanks, to smash his way through the best defensive position in the North African desert, one that earlier in the year had twice thwarted Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika when the roles were reversed. Not until 4 November did British tanks break through the Axis defences just south of the coastal sector where a superb Australian division had drawn off most of Rommel’s armour and paid a heavy price for it.
The third 70th anniversary comes four days later when Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy French North Africa. Athough French resistance was far from the token one they had been hoping for – some 1600 Allied troops were killed, mostly Americans – the occupation of Algeria and Morocco and soon eastern Tunisia sealed the fate of the Panzerarmee and was of huge strategic significance. Even more so when Hitler, desperate to at least delay an invasion of his Italian ally from across the Mediterranean reinforced defeat. When Axis forces surrenere in Tunis in May 1943 more than half of the 275,000 prisoners taken were German, far more than the 91,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad. The Wehrmacht called it Tunisgrad.
In recent years I have been giving radio and live audience talks On Saturday 19 November I was also talking about Britain’s forgotten war within war against Vichy, at a well attended World War Two Celebrity Speakers Day hosted by London’s National Army Musuem in Chelsea. The other authors involved were Lord Asa Briggs, Brian Ford, Roger Field and Sean Longden. Othr talks have ranged from ‘War Without Hate - the North African campaign and the Empire’s Last Victory’ ; Singapore - its myths and heroism.’ ‘Orde Wingate and the guerrillas he led in Burma, Ethiopia and Zion”; ‘The Last Crusade - Allenby’s cavalry campaign in Palestine and his capture of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917’.
For talks contact richardforeman.chalke@hotmail.co.uk or write to me at POB 20827, Nicosia 1664, Cyprus
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