Alexander H. Joffe - Operation Crusader and the Desert War in British History and Memory: ‘What Is Failure? What Is Loyalty?’

Why do we remember the things that we do? How do certain narratives come to be accepted as standard or authoritative? How then do we come to believe those things as history, and incorporate them into ourselves, helping to form our identities? And how does this vie with memories, the fabric of our experience, to form the larger realities of society, its culture and character? What is included or elided, why or by whom? And how does one episode illuminate a larger whole, the pattern of remembering and forgetting?

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is famously (if inaccurately) quoted as having said that the two things one should never see being made are laws and sausages. To this we should perhaps add the process of writing history.

The Desert War has a particular place in the history of the Second World War. From 1940 to 1943 hundreds of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers confronted equal and larger numbers of Italians and Germans in battles across half the width of the Mediterranean. These battles were crucial to the course of the war and included notable successes at a time when the British military was reeling elsewhere.

For the most part historical focus on this theatre of the war, however, does not begin before the summer of 1942 and the appointment of Bernard Law Montgomery as commander of British forces prior to the famous second and third battles of El Alamein. Why did the British popular narrative, and those of many professional historians, begin here and not earlier? Part of answer is found not only in Montgomerys relentless self-promotion but also in the pattern of military success and then reverses that prevailed before August 1942, a series of command and operational failures, and how they were selectively recalled. But what exactly was remembered and what was forgotten, by whom and why?

This book tells three stories: what happened on a North African battlefield in late November 1941; how that event was remembered by participants, historians and journalists; and what it all meant, or didnt mean, to the British people. The first is an unusual story of commanders on a battlefield, about events and decisions including mental breakdown and acts of insubordination that quietly shaped the outcome of battle and possibly the Second World War as a whole. The second is the story of how history is written of Official Historians and their governmental minders in competition (and collusion) with journalists and memoirists. And the third is about Britain after the Second World War, how events of enormous wartime gravity resonated for a shrinking number of people, largely within the Establishment and with an ageing cadre of retired military leaders, while societys interests as a whole simultaneously moved away from history and towards sentimental representation.