LA GUERRE DU DÉSERT

A new history of the desert wars in North Africa from 1940 to 1943 by a team of international scholars.

The war waged in the desert from the spring of 1940 to the summer of 1943, from Libya to Egypt and from Morocco to Algeria and Tunisia, has long been reduced to the confrontation between Rommel and Montgomery, French heroism at Bir Hakeim and the Allied invasion in November 1942. As if, in fact, the victory of 1945 had been won only elsewhere, in the snows of Stalingrad and the Normandy countryside. For the first time, top international specialists, brought together by Olivier Wieviorka, examine this theater of operations, reintegrate it into the vast horizons of the Second World War and study everything that makes it unique. By considering the desert war in its plurality, they enter previously unexplored territory – encompassing logistics, the multinational composition of the troops engaged, and the complex relations between colonizers and colonized – and are quick to dispel certain myths, including that of the so-called “war without hate” conducted by the chivalrous “Desert Fox”. This desert war, or “war of the sands”, is thus given the place it merits – one of the most important – in the historiography and the memory of the Second World War.

A professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan and a specialist in the history of the Resistance and the Second World War, OLIVIER WIEVIORKA is the author of a History of the Normandy Landings and a History of the Resistance that received public acclaim and an award from the Académie Française. He also co- directed, with Jean Lopez, Les Mythes de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (The Myths of the Second World War) in 2 volumes, and, with Hervé Drévillon, L'Histoire militaire de la France (The Military History of France in 2 volumes) (both at Perrin).