Book review – Sting of the Scorpion

Sting of the Scorpion – The inside story of the Long range Desert Group, by Mike Morgan. Approximately 250 pages and 32 pages of photos.

This book covers the LRDG from its start in the desert of North Africa and the well-known action there, through training in Lebanon, disaster in the Greek archipelago and final action in the Balkans.

The book is essentially a collection of short stories, or snippets, collected from veterans. Mostly a short introduction, a couple of lines, on what’s to come, and then a page or two of story. The stories are in the veterans own words, on everything from daily life to battle.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it does give you a feeling of how life in the LRDG was, it is well written and quite a few interesting pictures, on the other hand it is just a lot of anecdotes. The latter makes it hard to get a feeling of the whole picture.

As I’m in the process of reading a handful of books about LRDG I believe this will give me an extra dimension to the history of the unit. But if you want to read just one book about LRDG, and get a chronological account of the action, then this is not the book for you.

I give it a rating of a weak 3 out of 5.