End of the Beginning - Tapa dura

Praise for FINEST HOUR: 'Brilliant...should form part of the National Curriculum.' - Daily Mail The survivors...have some first-class tales to tell. There's Peter Vaux, an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment who got lost behind enemy lines, and his story is so good that I won't spoil it for you. You'd have to be pretty brutalised not to be moved by it all...Perhaps it really was our finest hour. - John Peel, Radio Times Personally compelling and politically revealing - New York Times Compelling...Mesmerising stuff. - Sunday Telegraph The authors' approach has a warmth and immediacy about it which provides a clear but gripping view of Britain's darkest hour. - Air Mail - Journal of the RAF Association From fighter pilots risking their lives in the skies above England, to squaddies stranded at Dunkirk, to schoolgirls sent abroad to Canada (the book is worth buying just for Bess Walder's account of horror and redemption aboard the City of Benares), this is riveting. - Sunday Express Manages to construct the tale in such a way that it breaks free of the text-book approach...Compiled with a pace that could put a lot of thrillers to shame. - Time Out a remarkable story of determined, against-the-odds resistance...you have to search long and hard to find one with this kind of richness in the reporting and craftsmanship in the telling. - Chicago Herald Tribune

1942 - British troops are stranded in the desert, struggling to hold back Rommel's Afrika Corps. Hitler's armies have reached Moscow, and there are murmurs of discontent at home as new doubts emerge about Churchill's leadership. Elsewhere in Europe there is chilling evidence of the mounting persecution of the Jews, stretching from Poland to the Channel Islands. For many, it seems there is little hope. The authors use the personal testimony of ordinary people to tell the story of the war at a moment of great crisis. In this book we meet again some of the people first encountered in the authors' previous title "Finest Hour", and get to know many more. Troops fighting for Montgomery in the desert, RAF pilots bombing German towns, a young Jewish woman deported to Auschwitz from Guernsey, the reality of the Home Front - these stories and many more painting a picture of human endeavour in time of war. And, 60 years on from the Battle of Alamein, the book tells the contorversial truth about one of the most famous battles in history - the importance of its lesser-know predecessor and the months of bitter in-fighting between the Allied generals. The authors aim to debunk the myths and explore the realities of a crucial year in the history of Britain.