Desert War

by Russell Hill

Overview

This is the kind of book you’ve been waiting for about the war—a book by a correspondent who was in the thick of the actual fighting, in the front lines and sometimes ahead of them. Only in North Africa, because of the strange fluid quality of desert tactics, have correspondents actually been allowed to see men in battle—to attach themselves to fighting units and to move constantly with those units. It is this which gives its unique quality to Russell Hill’s account of the second British invasion of Cyrenaica.

Mr. Hill is the brilliant young Cairo correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune. He knew the campaign was going to start days before it actually did; and he was permitted to inspect oasis outposts, supply dumps, and even Tobruk itself, still surrounded and still magnificently holding out. When the big “flap” began, Hill moved out with a forward unit, and was immediately plunged into that made swirling melee that is deeper fighting, and to which no description short of Hill’s own can do justice.

If you were puzzled by the reports which came for days from Sidi Rezegh, where Rommel made his stand and his escape; if your heart leapt at the relief of Tobruk; if your hopes were raised then the British reached El Agheila, and were dashed down again when Rommel lashed back to Tobruk and the Egyptian border—you will find all the answers and the explanations in this book.

With 14 illustrations and 5 maps.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787209190
Publisher:	Arcole Publishing
Publication date:	01/12/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	189
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Russell Hill (1918-2007) was a radio commentator and foreign correspondent. In 1939 he joined the Berlin Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune as assistant to Joseph Barnes and at the same time began helping William L. Shiver with his work for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Mr. Hill was only twenty years old when he arrived in Germany in July of that fateful year, but he knew French, German and Russian and had already seen a good deal of Europe. He had been educated at a two-room rural school in New York State, at a typical American high school, at private schools in Switzerland, Germany and Connecticut, and at Columbia. He had been awarded the Kellett Fellowship from Columbia to Cambridge, but had chosen newspaper work instead.

And in December 1939, Mr. Hill at twenty-one found himself the only Berlin representative of his paper, when his superior was expelled by the Nazis. Soon, Mr. Hill was expelled too—it happened to lots of correspondents in those days—so he went southward into the Balkans. He covered Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia; his stories from Cairo of his escape in a small motor boat, with three other correspondents, were probably the first detailed account printed of the Yugoslav debacle.

After this Mr. Hill followed the Syrian campaign, saw British and Russian troops meet in Iran, and at last was sent to Cairo. What he saw in North Africa forms the substance of the brilliant and dramatic book Desert War (1942).

He remained in Europe after the war and wrote about the emerging Cold War in his book Struggle for Germany (1947).

Mr. Hill passed away on July 31, 2007 in Medford, New Jersey at the age of 88.