The Diary Of A Desert Rat

The story of the last surviving 'Desert Rats' in their own words and their experience of war in North Africa.

This is the exact text of a diary , discovered after his death, which Private John Harris kept surreptiously during his time with the 8th Army in North Africa during the Second World War including his experiences at the famous battle of El Alamein.Some of the entries are unintentionally hilarious such as the description of members of another Company working behind enemy lines who captured some camels 'but on finding they were a bit fierce let them go again'.The diary commences in April 1942 with his voyage right round Africa and up the Suez Canal to join his Company and concludes two and a half years later after landing in Italy.The photos included in appropriate places are some of many he brought back from his travels. The diary also contained many contemporary newspaper cuttings which are also included. To facilitate reading Chapters have been created and a few comments and explanations added in italics.

More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts, and dangers, was going to be like. Alan Allport’s rich and luminous social history examines the experience of the greatest and most terrible war in history from the perspective of these ordinary, extraordinary men, who were plucked from their peacetime families and workplaces and sent to fight for King and Country. Allport chronicles the huge diversity of their wartime trajectories, tracing how soldiers responded to and were shaped by their years with the British Army, and how that army, however reluctantly, had to accommodate itself to them. Touching on issues of class, sex, crime, trauma, and national identity, through a colorful multitude of fresh individual perspectives, the book provides an enlightening, deeply moving perspective on how a generation of very modern-minded young men responded to the challenges of a brutal and disorienting conflict.

In this fascinating book, the author tells how badly Britain needed to defeat the German panzer divisions, led by the brilliant Rommel, the "Desert Fox." He evokes what life was like for troops, and describes how day after day the tanks would grind forward, then mass together, their caterpillar tracks screeching across the flinty ground, ready for the great battles - from the dramatic defence of Tobruk to the great climax at Alamein, when Montgomery's Desert Rats finally routrd the Nazi enemy from the shores of North Africa.