EBOOK History of the 43rd and 52nd (Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire) Light Infantry

Today&'s British soldiers serving in Iraq will know the country in which much of this unit history is set - the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers known in the Great War as Mesopotamia. Unusually for such a work of record, the author lays down the background to the Great War in the Middle East in some detail - stressing such factors as the German-Turkish alliance; the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway and Britain&'s interest in the Persian ( Iranian) oilfields. He also reports events with a topical resonance today - such as anti-British riots in Basra, and the declaration of a &'JIhad&'. The 43rd took part in the defeat of the Turks at Khan Baghdadi, and after the armistice in the spring of 1919 was re-deployed to Archangel in northern Russia in an effort to nip the Bolshevik revoloution in the bud. Under the command of General Sir Edmund &'Tiny&' Ironside the 43rd battled gallantly against Bolshevik forces, although beset by flies, mosquitoes, bloodsucking ticks called clegs - and their unreliable White Russian allies. At last, partly through lack of progress and partly due to political pressure against an un popular foreign adventure - another echo of today- the unit was withdrawn in the autumn of 1919. An intriguing and unusual account of two little-known camapigns with eerily prophetic echoes of events in Iraq today.