This book focuses on the extent to which the physical terrain features
across Egypt, Libya and Tunisia affected British operations throughout
the campaign in North Africa during the Second World War. One main theme
of the work analyses the terrain from the operational and tactical
perspective and argues that the landscape features heavily influenced
British operations and should now be considered alongside other standard
military factors. The work differs from previous studies in that it
considers these additional factors for the entire campaign until the
Axis surrender in May 1943. Until now it has been widely assumed that
much of the Western Desert coastal plateau was a broadly level, open
region in which mobile armored operations were paramount. However this
work concentrates on the British operations to show they were driven by
the need to capture and hold key features across each successive
battlefield. At the operational level planning was led by the need to
hold key ground across Libya and especially the province of Cyrenaica
during the crucial middle period of the campaign.
A secondary theme of the work argues that British forces began to
improvise certain tactical doctrines, which altered the early practice
of combined arms assaults into one of the Infantry and Armored
formations fighting largely separated battles until the autumn of 1942.
Other developments in doctrine which were affected by the terrain
included the practice of unit dispersal to hold key ground and the use
of temporary units such as Jock columns to harass and engage the enemy.
The two themes are inter-linked and contribute fresh insights to the
debate on British methods of warfare.
The author has consulted key primary documents, reports, war diaries and
published memoirs, from major UK archives and compared these with the
campaign historiography to develop the main themes of the work. These
include the National Archives, the Churchill Archives Center, the
Liddell-Hart Center for Military History, the National Army Museum, John
Rylands Center, Imperial War Museum at London and Duxford and London and
the Tank Museum Archives at Bovington. The sources include unit war
diaries, after action reports, along with many of the key published and
some unpublished memoirs. His text is supported by 24 pages of specially
commissioned color maps.