Alan Moorehead – författare

Part of the SECOND WORLD WAR VOICES series in partnership with the podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, presented by comedian Al Murray and bestselling historian James Holland.With a new introduction by James HollandEclipse was the code name given by the Allies to the occupation of Germany. Moorehead's book describes his experiences in Sicily and southern Italy in 1943, which culminated in the capture of Rome. He tells the electrifying story of D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the Allied advance through northern France and Belgium, the crossing of the Rhine.The author reconstructs, in terrifying detail, the collapse of Germany, the wholesale destruction, mass surrenders, and the unimaginable horrors of the concentration camps.

The Russian Revolution dismantled the ancient Tsarist autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. The Russian Empire collapsed with the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the old regime was replaced in February 1917. In the second revolution that October, the Provisional Government was removed and replaced with a Bolshevik (Communist) government.The Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, appointed themselves as leaders and seized control of the countryside, establishing the Cheka to quash dissent. To end Russia’s participation in the First World War, the Bolshevik leaders signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918.Civil war erupted among the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks), the ‘Whites’ (anti-socialist factions), and non-Bolshevik socialists. It continued for several years, during which the Bolsheviks defeated both the Whites and all rival socialists. In this way, the Revolution paved the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922.In this book Alan Moorehead gives a brilliant account of these formative events. This not only remains the most readable account of the revolution, but sheds fascinating light on the Western view of the Soviet Union at the time of writing during the Cold War.

Part of the SECOND WORLD WAR VOICES series in partnership with the podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, presented by comedian Al Murray and bestselling historian James Holland.With a new introduction by James HollandEclipse was the code name given by the Allies to the occupation of Germany. Moorehead's book describes his experiences in Sicily and southern Italy in 1943, which culminated in the capture of Rome. He tells the electrifying story of D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the Allied advance through northern France and Belgium, the crossing of the Rhine.The author reconstructs, in terrifying detail, the collapse of Germany, the wholesale destruction, mass surrenders, and the unimaginable horrors of the concentration camps.

The seminal account of the battle between Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Corps, amidst the endless harsh wastes of the Western Desert.In 1940, Alan Moorehead was sent to cover the North Africa campaign by the Daily Express, and he followed its dramatic course all the way to 1943. The three books he subsequently wrote about the Desert War – later collected as his ‘African Trilogy’ – were swiftly acclaimed as a classic account of the tussle between Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Corps, under the beating sun of the Egyptian Sahara's Western Desert.Moorehead was responsible for the celebrated insight that tank battles in the desert are like battles at sea, the lumbering tanks like ships lost in a vast ocean of sand. The New Statesman could not have put it better when it described his achievement with this riveting book:‘There is something of genius in the breadth and penetration of his vision, which encompasses the whole panorama of war and then narrows it down to the particular: the soldier stubbing out his cigarette before going into action, the expression on a tank commander’s face as he is hit… The story of the African campaigns will go down in history as one of the great epics of mankind, largely thanks to Mr Moorehead’s account.’

A century has now gone by, yet the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 is still infamous as arguably the most ill conceived, badly led and pointless campaign of the entire First World War. The brainchild of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, following Turkey's entry into the war on the German side, its ultimate objective was to capture the Gallipoli peninsula in western Turkey, thus allowing the Allies to take control of the eastern Mediterranean and increase pressure on the Central Powers to drain manpower from the vital Western Front. From the very beginning of the first landings, however, the campaign went awry, and countless casualties. The Allied commanders were ignorant of the terrain, and seriously underestimated the Turkish army which had been bolstered by their German allies. Thus the Allies found their campaign staled from the off and their troops hopelessly entrenched on the hillsides for long agonising months, through the burning summer and bitter winter, in appalling, dysentery-ridden conditions. By January 1916, the death toll stood at 21,000 British troops, 11,000 Australian and New Zealand, and 87,000 Turkish and the decision was made to withdraw, which in itself, ironically, was deemed to be a success. First published in 1956, when it won the inaugural Duff Cooper Prize, Alan Moorehead's book is still regarded as the definitive work on this tragic episode of the Great War. One could argue he was the first writer to capture the true turmoil that occurred in this campaign with his colourful, analytical and compelling style of prose. Sir Max Hastings himself says in this new introduction that he was inspired as a young man by Moorehead's books to become a reporter himself. With in-depth analysis of the campaign, the objectives both sides set themselves, and with character sketches of the main players, it brings the complex operation to life, showing how and why it went so terribly wrong and a century on, remains a by word for the loss of human life.