Event: The First Victory

Event recording from 19/1/2017 Andrew Stewart introduces his new book The First Victory: The Second World War and the East Africa Campaign, a riveting account of the long-overlooked achievement of British-led forces who, against all odds, scored the first major Allied victory of the Second World War. His latest book, The First Victory: The Second World War and the East Africa Campaign, examines one of the war’s great, but almost entirely overlooked, military campaigns. When the first shots were fired in the summer of 1940 along the Sudanese and Kenyan borders there was a great deal of interest across the British Empire in this expansion of the war into a hitherto largely ignored region. With France close to collapse the “Italian jackal”, Benito Mussolini, had launched a treacherous assault on those imperial territories in Africa which bordered his own. This was the same Duce who only a few years before had been ‘accommodated’ despite his clear war of aggression, the crimes carried out by his military forces in Ethiopia – of which there were many – being overlooked in the fanciful hope of maintaining an already largely illusionary balance of power and European stability. As the ‘Finest Hour’ developed and Britain and its imperial allies stood firm in their determination to defy and irritate their continental European adversary, opportunities to highlight any semblance of military success were welcomed in London by politicians and the public alike. Andrew Stewart is reader in conflict and diplomacy, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London, and co-director of the King’s Second World War Research Group. He has previously published four books on the Second World War. For more information, visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/events/eventsrecords/Dr.-Andrew-Stewart-The-First-Victory.aspx