Tobruk: The Great Seige 1941-2

Excellent book; I have not finished reading it, but some experts on the Desert Campaign might be put off by the space devoted to the run-up to the actual siege - I was not.For myself, I was a child during WW2 and although I followed the Campaign at the time, this book revealed many aspects of which I was unaware, particulary the East African Campaign.At the price, a good by.

Good book, lots of detailed information. Overall a very good experience if you like the history of the North African campaign this would be a good choice

The author is so biased against the British that he book is useless as history.

An interesting book in some ways, although pretty wrongly named since the siege doesn't appear in it until about halfway through. I'm actually very happy with what comes before that as I think the writer gives a fuller-than-usual treatment of operations before the first siege - the whole Wavell/O'Connor campaign which took Empire and Commonwealth troops to their first victories on land, and decisive ones at that. So, for example, the crucial battle of Beda Fomm gets heavy, absorbing, coverage.Sadly, the events of the actual siege of Tobruk - from which the book gets its title - are dealt with in a more perfunctory way, with heavy use of secondary sources. The author also has an irritating way of referring to people as 'a'(as in 'a Major Barkas'). The latter's book, incidentally, ('The Camouflage Story' (Cassell, 1952) by Geoffrey Barkas) is a first-hand narrative on camouflage in the Middle East and has a Chapter on Tobruk, which puts the efforts there into a wider Middle East context. Omission of any reference to it makes me wonder what else Buckingham has missed.I was also annoyed by the too-frequent typographical and spelling errors, some of which seriously altered the meaning of what was written, and wonder why the perfunctory few pages on the second 'siege' (the one we lost) were included. Padding to make up the word-count?Better books have been written about the great siege. I still recommend Frank Harrison's 'Tobruk - the Great Siege Reassessed' - a mixture of the author's own experiences during the whole of the siege together with his clear historical analysis - as among the best. And you can get it for a penny on Amazon, too...

The great siege of Tobruk was, for British and Empire forces, one of the most iconic campaigns of the Second World War. It deserves a decent and up to date history. Sadly this is not it. The book draws heavily on published sources and therefore suffers from the fact very few decent accounts of the siege have been produced. I would have liked to see greater use of the PRO at Kew and the records of the IWM as well as more first hand German and Italian sources. As it is the author is reduced to referencing enthusiast websites lacking any degree of peer review. The author is to be credited with making clear the role of Italian forces in the siege and highlighting the failings of Rommel that are often overlooked. However,a very large part of the book is devoted to Operation Compass and I wonder whether this was a result of the dearth of published sources on the siege of Tobruk itself? My biggest complaint with the book is the large number of typos. Was it not proof read at all? If so how could they all have been missed? This is a shame as it gets very grating (there is usally one every few pages) and at the same time detracts from the overal quality of the book. The book is well printed and put together, and the photos reproduced come out well (even if very few of them relate to Tobruk!) But the maps are laughably awful scrawls that my 5 year old could do better. Surely Tempus could have hired someone to tidy up the authors attempts at cartography? So all in all a disappointing book.