Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. Slight tanning to page edges. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Good luck to all the lads.’ Brian Cox wrote those words in his diary on 26August 1940 just before he and his mates from 9 Platoon of 27 (Machine Gun)Battalion experienced enemy action for the first time in the Western Desert. ANelson College old boy Brian enlisted to do his duty and to take part in a greatadventure’. But when he came home like so many of his mates he seldom spokeof his experiences. It was only a chance question some 25 years after Brian’sdeath that triggered his son Peter’s search to discover what his father had doneduring the Second World War. Brian’s personal diaries and the photographs hehad brought home were a good start but much more was needed: material fromthe official war histories archival documents and best of all memories frommen who had fought alongside Brian.And in 2007 Peter Cox and his wife Robin retraced Brian’s war journey inEgypt Libya and Greece. They visited the battlefield at Sidi Rezegh in the LibyanDesert where the platoon in the words of the official war history paid for itsdevotion in losses tragically heavy for such a small band’. They travelled the lengthof Greece following the route the New Zealand Division took and stood on thehillside where Brian and his mates had been dive-bombed and machine-gunned.In each place they visited the graves of the New Zealanders who died.What emerged was the story not only of Brian Cox but also of his schoolmatesfrom Nelson College and of 9 Platoon of 27 (Machine Gun) Battalion. Thismoving and fascinating book covers the men’s time with the First Echelon trainingin New Zealand and Egypt and the action they saw in Greece Libya and theWestern Desert. The battle at Sidi Rezegh in 1941 often overshadowed by ElAlamein loomed large in the platoon’s history; Peter Cox tells the terrible story ofthat conflict to which his father had once alluded but never elaborated on.Good Luck to All the Lads is more than one man’s tribute to his father. It is animportant addition to New Zealand’s military history and a fitting memorial tothe young men a number of them from Nelson College who bravely servedand sometimes died so far from home.