Book description
For the very first time, The War That Never Was tells
the fascinating story of a secret war fought by British
mercenaries in the Yemen in the early 1960s. In a covert operation
organised over whisky and sodas in the clubs of Chelsea and Mayfair, a
group of former SAS officers - led by the irrepressible Colonel Jim
Johnson - arranged for a squadron of British mercenaries to travel to
the remote mountain regions of the Yemen, to arm, train and lead
Yemeni tribesmen in their fight against a 60,000-strong contingent of
Egyptian soldiers.
It was one of the most uneven running battles ever waged; the
Egyptians fielded a huge, professionally-trained army. The British
fought back at the head of a ragtag force of tribal warriors and,
ultimately, won. Egypt's President Nasser described the battle in the
Yemen as 'my Vietnam'.
It's a fascinating, forgotten, and rip-roaringly entertaining pocket
of British military history, much in the spirit of Ben MvIntyre's
bestselling Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat.
Duff Hart-Davis has written and edited fifty books on a wide
variety of subjects, including eight adventure novels and biographies
of Peter Fleming, the traveller and author, J. J.Audubon, the American
bird artist, and most recently Philip de László, the portrait
painter. A deep interest in natural history led to Monarchs of the
Glen, a history of the Highland deer forests, and to the
much-praised illustrated encyclopaedia Fauna Britannica.
He worked on the Sunday Telegraph as Literary Editor and
feature writer, reporting from many parts of the world, and from 1986
to 2001 he contributed the weekly Country Matters column on rural
affairs to the Independent. Together with his wife Phyllida he
now lives in a 17th-century farmhouse on the Cotswold escarpment.
