1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A worthwhile account of an almost forgotten conflict., March 7, 2006
This review is from: Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962-67 (Hardcover)
As British influence and colonial power throughout the Middle East diminished in the 1960s, the strategic military base of Aden soon became a battle ground at the centre of a bloody war that no side could possibly win outright.
Jonathan Walker is a member of the British Commission for Military History and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham's Centre for First World War Studies who has a number of acclaimed works to his credit. He is, therefore, well qualified to write a book about Britain's last colonial conflict and, all things considered, appears to have produced a most thorough job of work.
Commencing with an all-important explanation of the Kingdom of Sheba, the author steers the reader quite expertly through the cause, condition and eventual outcome of the conflict in a book containing almost 300 pages of narrative plus those equally important explanations and further detail found in the appendices at the end.
Personally, I was just as pleased to find a full and frank account of that well known, though often misunderstood and misquoted, contribution made by Lt. Colonel Colin Mitchell and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders as I was to discover some of the horrific injuries and assassinations visited upon British civilian staff and their families.
The text is supported with a carefully chosen and relevant selection of photographs found together in the middle of the book and, altogether, this product should please most readers for it's factual accuracy and clarity of delivery.
NM
British Army Major (Retired).
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ample documentation of the British side of the "Aden Insurgency", July 25, 2006
This review is from: Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962-67 (Hardcover)
Jonathan Walker, presumably an old boy of Downside, and the son of Sir Gervas Walker, to whom he dedicated this book, has written a good history of the British efforts to quell what they deemed the "Aden Insurgency," the efforts in the 1960s by some inhabitants of South Yemen to end the presence of the British Empire in their country.
Once in a while one reads a book, and doesn't know whether to give it five stars, three stars or merely a single star. As a military history of the British engagement, it would undoubtedly deserve five stars, particularly for its meticulous research. On the other hand, no effort whatsoever is expended to fathom the motivations of the "dissidents" and then "terrorists," whose behavior is described with the same bafflement one usually describes lunatics. Few if any participants on the other (winning) side are quoted in the least; can one clap with only one hand?
Given that Sun Tzu wrote that the first part of any strategy is to know one's enemy, it is no surprise that the British efforts to stay on in Aden ended in humiliating defeat. For years, the British didn't even know who their principal enemy was. Perhaps this complete cultural illiteracy and blindness to the political and historical undercurrents is what makes this book absolutely stellar; it seems to be an iteration of an all too frequent political process: throw English-speaking soldiers with massive firepower into an Arab country, ignore most, if not all, political and historical undercurrents, label all dissidents "terrorists" to be ignored or taken on militarily, and then ultimately watch the theoretically superior force leave in shame, defeated by unconventional warfare. Semper idem!
That the British were forced to leave comes as no surprise, and given Aden's subsequent fate, is a tragedy. Many, many former subjects of the British Empire will truthfully tell you that their lives were much better under the British.
That a British historian can in this day, in all seriousness, write such a one-sided history is perhaps surprising, and certainly a warning to any aspiring "pacifiers" of the Arab world. Perhaps the implicit lessons to be drawn from this book make it worthwhile to Anglophones interested in the Middle East's (military) history.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I was there, July 19, 2005
This review is from: Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962-67 (Hardcover)
A well researched, honest, truthful and well written account of a difficult time in one of England's far-flung colonies. A worthwhile read for budding historians.
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