War's Nomads

“The only known detailed account in existence of the small radar units who played a key part in the Western Desert Campaign . . . Highly recommended” (Military Modelcraft International).  War’s Nomads is an evocative account of one man’s experience of life in a mobile radar unit after the battle of El Alamein as Rommel’s Afrika Korps was relentlessly pursued across the desert through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia by the Eighth Army.   After Fred Grice was called up in 1941, he kept two journals of his experiences. The first deals with waiting to embark after initial training, the journey to the battle zone, and the privations of a low-ranking AC. Daily life onboard a ship is vividly brought to life with details of routine, the cramped conditions, the banter and hobbies used to pass the time by the troops, and the luxurious-by-contrast existence of the officers. The second gives a detailed account of the activities of Unit 606, a radar crew that follows just behind the battlefront. 606 provided radio-detection for the advanced landing grounds being used by RAF fighter-bomber squadrons, because these landing strips, in turn, were the target of the German Luftwaffe and Italian Air Force attacks. It was a tiny unit, never more than ten men, frequently operating for protracted periods in complete isolation. Fred Grice’s account lyrically evokes the landscape and the often tense and dangerous environment they operated in, pitching the reader into the experience of traveling with the unit in a three-ton truck, finding ingenious solutions to lack of rations and living space, even commandeering an abandoned boat to relax in the sea, while constantly needing to be alert to dodge air attacks.   Along with these colorful first-person accounts, War’s Nomads includes an authoritative introduction explaining the background to the military events of the Western Desert campaign, and the purpose of 606’s mission, which Grice for security reasons could not talk about: to get to a selection of the two hundred or so landing grounds in the desert with all speed—and then defend them against air attack by using a light warning radar set developed to go operational within an hour.