Tales From The King's African Rifle (Cassell Military Paperbacks) Book

Tales from the King's African Rifles is the memoirs of a young man sent halfway around the world to utterly foreign climes to fight for King and country in the Second World War. Lying about his age so as to be able to attend the Officer Cadet Training Unit, John Nunneley, an 18-year-old raw recruit, could hardly have imagined what the next four years would bring. Fuelled by a dauntless sense of duty and a childhood diet of Boy's Own adventures and tales of glorious exploits from the Empire, his ambition was a posting to the Middle East "where there was enough fighting to satisfy the most warlike of young men". Fate was to take him elsewhere, firstly to East Africa where he became an officer of the King's African Rifles (KAR) 3rd/6th. With the capitulation of the Italian forces in Africa, there was little of the action he so craved there although, as you would expect, he still has plenty of episodes to recount, like the time he was nearly court-martialled for over-zealously accusing a rather butch Italian lady of being an escaping POW in disguise--the immodest method the young lady used to prove her gender in this matter constituting a breach of the Geneva convention on the surprised young man's part. Like the book itself, Nunneley's war really gets going in the second half with his dispatch to north-east India to fight the Japanese in Burma. There are tales that will make you laugh, others that will set the pulse racing and some that will bring a tear to the eye, notably when his trusted and respected young (even younger than he) servant-turned-private of the KAR, Tomasi Kitinya, is killed in his first action. Altogether, the book is written in a straightforward, no-nonsense style with plenty of interesting background information adding further interest to the story of what was a very atypical war. --Alisdair BowlesRead More