Hitler's Gulf War The Fight for Iraq 1941

Book Code:  AW0872

Hitler's Gulf War The Fight for Iraq 1941

 

This is a true story of heroes, of extreme acts of courage, of incredible improvisations, of massive gambles by men with nothing to lose...and of winning against all odds.

 

During the spring of 1941 on an isolated, indefensible RAF base 55 miles from Baghdad a group of students and instructors in obsolete training aircraft supported by a few poorly armed soldiers outfought the much larger and better armed Iraqi forces aided by the Germans and Italians. A small hastily assembled column of cavalry, infantry and the Arab Legion in a motley collection of commandeered buses, trucks, taxis and a few World War One vintage armoured cars did what no army in history had done.

 

The outnumbered and outgunned column fought its way across 500 miles of unmapped barren desert in temperatures approaching fifty degrees to the RAF base at Habbaniya. In a gigantic, audacious, game of deception less than fifteen hundred soldiers supported by the RAF in their vintage biplanes against odds of twenty to one went on to take Baghdad. They foiled a coup, returned a King to his throne and destroyed Axis aspirations in the Middle East. This engagement would prove to be the first real defeat of the Germans in World War Two.

 

This book is based on the research into a wide range of academic,official,personal and private sources. It uses reported American,British,German,Italian and Iraqi dialogue wherever possible to produce this remarkable account of a thirty day war in Iraq in 1941,how it played out and how it set the scene for Iraq's turbulent future which has come back to haunt the West.

 

Barrie G. James

Hardcover 240pp.