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Key documents relating to Auchinleck's career up to the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942, including his time as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and of the Middle East Theatre. The outbreak of war in 1939 saw the then Lieutenant General Claude Auchinleck recalled to England to take command of the newly formed 4 Corps. Between April and June 1940 he commanded British troops in the ill-fated Norway campaign. He then returned to the UK to take command of 5 Corps in Southern Command during the invasion threat of 1940. In January 1941 Auchinleck returned to India and started some much needed reforms of what was still, very much, a 'colonial army' before becoming C in C Middle East in June 1941. In the Middle East, Auchinleck faced many challenges in commanding a multi-national force, largely composed of 'citizen soldiers' and his problems were complicated by the demands of Winston Churchill, an anxious Prime Minister who desperately wanted to show his allies and the British public a major victory. Auchinleck is open to the charges that he did not fully understand armoured warfare and that he appointed a number of the wrong men to key posts. However, he did manage to fight Axis forces to a standstill at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 before being replaced by the team of Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander and General Bernard Montgomery. This volume is based on the Auchinleck papers held in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester and aims to bring these important records to a much wider audience.

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During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irish men and a much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuable archival and newspaper sources.There has been a tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officials persistently characterised it as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918.This book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Ireland and Great Britain.

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