Product Description

For Great Britain there were two pivotal battles in the Second World War. One was the Battle of Britain. The other was El Alamein. There, in October 1942, in a remote part of the desert between Libya and Egypt, at a place named only for the sake of its nondescript railway station, and after a year of stalemate, the British army under the command of General Montgomery won an epic battle of attrition with Rommel's Afrika Korps. If the first kept Britain in the war to stand a chance of fighting Hitler, El Alamein turned the tide, after several years of retreat and defeat, that set the Allies on the road to future victory. Like the Battle of Britain, moreover, Alamein has taken its place in history as more than just a military battle: it has become a national myth. Where 1940 was consecrated by Churchill as "their finest hour", Alamein has been enshrined for posterity as "the end of the beginning" - as the line in the sand that Hitler's forces were ultimately unable ever to cross. Now, Stephen Bungay, author of The Most Dangerous Enemy, the history of the Battle of Britain Aurum Press published in 2000 that has already been acknowledged as the standard work on the subject, unlikely to be surpassed for its comprehensiveness and authority, has written a new and immensely readable history of Alamein. Like Stalingrad, Alamein is a book for the general reader: a superb narrative that covers every aspect of the battle: the political context that urgently demanded a military victory for Churchill as his government's fortunes reached their lowest ebb; the technological contest between the German tanks and the British artillery; the soldiers' war - a phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade, swirling sand and baking heat; and the meeting of two evenly-matched military minds as the brilliant but mercurial Rommel faced the fastidious, dapper Montgomery across the desert wastes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #251843 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
Following his acclaimed history of the Battle of Britain, Bungay now turns his attention to the other great British triumph of the Second World War - El Alamein. In the North African desert in autumn 1942, the British Eighth Army under General Montgomery defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps in an epic battle. For anyone who has any military experience or memories of the Second World War this is an unputdownable account. Indeed, it should be required reading for everyone, especially for the fourth chapter, entitled 'The Soldiers' War', which provides a graphic and realistic account of the conditions experienced by front-line troops. This book is not just an account of a battle, but provides a broad sweep of the events which led up to it, and a less sweeping account of its aftermath. It also puts the whole desert war in perspective in relation to the war as a whole. Bungay shows how compared with the Wehrmacht the British (and Commonwealth) armies were ill-prepared and undertrained. Montgomery was a prickly egotist, and few will disagree with Bungay's critical summation, but none who encountered him will ever forget his dynamic and inspiring leadership. His ruthless weeding out of the incompetent went far below senior commanders and transformed the Eighth Army. While Rommel was expert at exploiting opportunity, Montgomery's genius lay not only in his preparation for battle, but in sticking to his intentions. Of course, and quite rightly, much is made here of supplies and air superiority, but in the end battles are won by the bloody clash of infantry. If there is a criticism to be made of this gripping analysis, it is in a neglect of those whose bayonets and raw courage actually did the job. The British soldier, at the worst of times, never lost confidence in his own ability, only in those who led him. Montgomery restored his belief. This is a brilliant account of Alamein and all the issues surrounding it - political, military and technological. Highly recommended. (Kirkus UK)

Jonathan Spencer-Payne, Bookseller magazine, 29 March 2002
A fascinatingly detailed account. I found all the interweaving events that made up this conflict very illuminating.

Imperial War Museum 'Dispatches' magazine
Covers every aspect of the desert war in superb narrative, excitingly and movingly... This is the book to read at this time of the year.

Customer Reviews

Alamein: Managing for Victory
Stephen Bungay's last book, "The Most Dangerous Enemy", broke new ground in military history by analysing the strategic and organisational elements of the conflict in terms of modern management thinking. By bringing a similar approach to the most important land battle Britain fought during World War II, Bungay again demonstrates the power and the versatility of the approach, while picking up some of the more intriguing themes from his earlier work.
Here again the analysis of organisational details is scholarly and precise. It is also immensely revealing, showing the effect on the battle of contrasting management styles: the German "mission command" approach offering enormous benefits in flexibility, motivation and creativity, compared with the more feudal British style, which appears to have managed to combine bureaucratic decision-making with "permission to whinge". It is in this context that Montgomery's leadership qualities and his deliberate rhetoric and self-glorification are seen as justified by their effectiveness... His caution and thoroughness contrast strongly with the personal nobility and flair of underrated heroes like Auchinlech and O'Connor but they could not have achieved the morale boosting impact Monty did; they could not have achieved at least some semblance of cooperation between tanks and infantry as Monty eventually did; most importantly they would not have emphasised training to the point where the British army was finally and permanently transformed into at least an adequate fighting machine.
Bungay's analysis of logistics is again painstaking and insightful, showing the importance of communications (particularly of Bletchley's brilliance at decryption) and the criticality of the large "overhead" that so disturbed Churchill. It is through this analysis that one gets an understanding of many of the individually determining features of the campaign, such as the importance of Malta, the impossibility of desert fighting without plenty of petrol and the impact of air superiority on desert supply capabilities.
In all this analysis, Bungay never loses sight of the human side of war. His descriptions of the soldiers' point of view (the flies, the terror of being burned alive in a tank, the general indignity of all forms of desert death) are exceptionally moving.
In a similar vein, Bungay takes us through the impact of the many personal clashes which characterised the war for both sides: Douglas versus Park (again), Rommel versus Kesselring, Montgomery versus Lumsden. Interestingly many of the British conflicts seem to have been about style - the archetypal British public schoolboy against the pragmatic modern concept of leadership - while the Germans' were more about substance. Rommel's frustration with Kesselring has a logic which seems to be lacking in Montgomery's distaste for Lumsden. Nor does Bungay omit the disastrous effect of lionising the air hero, Marseille, on Germany's effectiveness against British bombers, another theme that echoes his analysis of the Battle of Britain.
For all this analysis, Bungay, like the best type of management thinker, never loses sight of the big picture. The strategic emphasis on Russia that caused Germany to pass up the chance of domination in North Africa and the Middle East at the start of the campaign, the importance of a victory to the political support that enabled Churchill to continue to lead the war effort, and the fundamental incompatibility of Germany and Italy as allies, are all thoroughly documented and explained and their significance demonstrated.
The deep analysis and managerial insight Bungay has brought to this work has again shown itself to be a powerful framework for gaining a revealing and fresh perspective on historical events and a refreshingly original experience for the reader. It is to be hoped that there are more such works in Bungay's pipeline.

An account of leadership for any leader
Notions of leadership in the business community, which I serve as consultant and educator, are fuzzy and confused. Military leaders, however, face disaster if they fail to ensure clarity of mission. Dr Bungay's crisp analysis of mission command, which defines mission as the union of task and purpose, goes a long way to explaining the success of Rommel despite the Wehrmacht's inferior resources, and the initial failure of British forces in North Africa. But this is much more than an historian's account. Dr Bungay practices as a leading business strategist, and this book is a must for the business leader's bookshelf. The fascinating discussion of Montgomery's turnaround of British morale also provides practical takeaways that restore the Aristotelian art of rhetoric as a competence that any leader must master.

Professor Dominic Houlder, London Business School

Life at the sharp end
This is a book that tells you how it was. It protrays in vivid detail how the war in the western desert played out for all of the participants; it combines excellent descriptions of the 'soldiers war' - a war of heat, flies, boredom and terror - with a fine exposition on the developing strategic situation in 1941-2. Throw in a good dose of Churchill's battles with the House of Commons, mix it with the seige of Malta, the misguided exploits of the Luftwaffe figher aces and a refreshingly honest assessment of the chief protangonists Montgomery and Rommel and and you have a cracking good read. Whether you are a historian, military enthusiast or casual browser, the engaging style of this book will hit the mark.