| The War in Iraq revived
public focus on the Desert Rats whose famous battles of World War II
helped turn the tide of Nazi dominance. In Iraq, seven units of the
British Army which now form the 7th Armoured Brigade, bearers of the
Desert Rats insignia, were immediately engaged in some of the fiercest
early fighting, ultimately taking Basra for the Allies.
Nothing less was expected of this most renowned of
British fighting forces which came into being as part of the Western
Desert Force in 1939, as the 7th Armoured Division and subsequently
fought with Montgomery's 8th Army in the great desert battles.
They underpinned epic campaigns culminating in El
Alamein, where Rommel's much-vaunted Afrika Corps was poised to begin
the last rout of the British in North Africa in 1942. But they met unimagined
resistance from an army spearheaded by the Desert Rats. As Winston Churchill
wrote: 'Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never
had a defeat.' And from Africa, the Desert Rats moved with Montgomery
to spearhead the British forces in their March across Europe following
the D-Day landings.
After the war the Desert Rats re-emerged as part of
the NATO forces during the Cold War years, and various units that became
famous in World War II went on to participate in virtually every major
conflict involving British troops in the remainder of the 20th Century,
including deployments to Bosnia and Kosovo and the two Gulf Wars. In
this latest of his military histories, John Parker once again draws
heavily on the drama of first-hand accounts for a story that is a seminal
part of modern military history. |
