The Twenty Thousand Thieves.

HARDBACK "UNCOMMON," SHIPPED FROM THE UK* Edition: 1st. Thus.* Impression: 1st.* Date of Publication: 1952. * Publisher: Frederick Muller. * Binding and cover condition: Dark blue cloth covered boards, silver titles to spine only. Very slight bumps to top corners, minor rubs & slight fade to head and tail of spine, minimal age to boards. VG.* Jacket condition: Colour illustrated paper dust wrapper showing a WW II desert scene with a tank and a rifle supporting an Australian hat in the foreground. NOT PRICE CLIPPED, showing a shelf price of 12/6d . Badly torn and worn with losses to top & bottom edge and to head & tail of spine. Now re-inforced and in An un-attahced clear protective wrapper. ACC * Contents condition: PRIVATE COPY NOT EX-LIBRARY. No annotations or inscriptions. Clean, crisp, tight and bright with light reading wear, no marks or tanning to text, slight marks & age darkening to all edges. VG+.* Illustrations: None. * Pages: 318 pp. text. iii pp. blank at rear.* Description: There have been novels written about many facets of the Second World War but this was the first really great book about the most famous campaign of that war; the epic desert struggle which culminated in "the end of the beginning," the historic battle of El Alamein. Eric Lambert presents his story through the eyes of a dozen or so Australian infantrymen, members of the Second X Battalion, who land in Egypt in January !941. They take part in the victorious Allied advance westward, retreat and are besieged in Tobruk, are withdrawn to Palestine and finally return to action and conclusive victory under Montgomery at El Alamein in October 1942. This brutally honest novel is the story, in miniature, of the whole desert war and perhaps in a large degree that of infantrymen at war anywhere. * A NEAR VG++ copy of the 1st /1st with some faults reducing it to VG, in a poor dust cover now re-inforced and in a protective cover.*