Product Description

In March 1941, with Wavell's British troops having routed the Italians from Cyrenaica. General Erwin Rommel amived in Tripoli to command the Deutsches Africakorps. Over the next two years the 'Afrikakorps' and its commander would become legendary. In his first offensive, Rommel swept across the desert, driving the British back to the Egyptian frontier and capturing much of the 2nd Armoured Division in the process. One thom remained in his side - the vital port of Tobruk continued to resist, If it could hold out Rommel's offensive might be halted. Wavell instructed General Morshead and his garrison of 30,000 determined Australians to hold at all cost. The scene was set for one of the epic struggles of the desert war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133623 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Jim Laurier is a native of New Hampshire. He graduated with honours from the Paiers School of Art Connecticut, in 1978 and has worked as a freelance illustrator ever since, completing assignments in a wide variety of fields. Jim has a keen interest in military subject, both aviation and armour, and is a Fellow member of the American Society of Aviation Artists, the New York Society of Illustrators and the American Fighter Aces Association. Jon Latimer lives in Swansea where he studied Oceanography, and after a varied career in environmental science now writes full-time. Jon also served for 17 years in the Temtorial Army, including an attachment to the Australian Army Reserve. He has already written Campaign 73: Operation Compass 1940 for Osprey. He is also the author of The Art of Deception in War.

Customer Reviews

A very fine book of its kind.
Osprey Campaign Series has produced several fine books. In a fairly short book paticular battles are outlined with supporting maps and pictures.

Tobruk is a fine example of such a book. Military readers will be familiar with such descriptions as a major engagement between tens of thousands of combatants is decided at a point where only a few hundred soldiers actually fight. Such an engagement is the Battle of the Salient in April-May 1941 and it is well covered in the book.

The defence of Tobruk was a monumental task, the Australian force under the command of General Morshead or Ming the Merciless as he was affectionally known by his men where asked to hold Tobruk for eight weeks. The siege lasted 8 months.

In the Desert Was the few towns were of great importance and in paticular places such as Tobruk which had a harbor. The stand of Tobruk prevented Rommel from advancing further to Egypt.

It was a monumental siege and became the very essence of all what the British and the Commonwealth stood for, a bull dog refusing to give in before the mighty Germans and for the first time the Germans could not find victory.

It is a good book of its kind and goes through those eventful 8 months with much detail.

More of the same old tat
The narrative is good, I've got no problems with the narrative, it's the pictures I don't like.

They are quite simply garbage. The artist demonstrates that he can do landscapes and sky but everything else eludes him. The anatomy of his figures is very poor(see the dreadful AfrikaKorps engineers), details of equipment are wrong (hilariously his rendering of a bren gun has no pistol grip) and as a whole they are boring symphonies in the key of brown. The details of the shorts on the gunners servicing the (out of scale) 90mm gun are wrong. But the most heinous example is however the Australian night patrol: just a bunch of dull figures in KD and hobnail boots. No plimsolls, no jerseys, no cap comforters, no burnt cork, no captured beretta smg's, oh and nothing to say they're Australians rather than any other troops.

On the whole a dull, lazy effort.

An ok book
I liked this book when I first read it however I did notice what seemed to be whole chunks of text lifted directly from the British Official Histories by I.S.O. Playfair that had not been given credit via a footnote on that particular page (the book lacks footnotes on the pages that's not the problem however with such amount of text lifted I would have expected to have seen one to give credit where it is deserved).

With that said I still like the book and it is supported by excellent diagrams, paintings and photos in particular I liked the diagram of what a typical defensive point in the Tobruk perimeter looked like.

This book is worth a look and does appear to give a good overview of the battle and operations fought to relive the garrison.