KENNEDY, John Noble (1893-1970). The Business of War, London, 1957, 8vo, original buckram. FIRST EDITION, ANNOTATED AND HIGHLIGHTED IN PENCIL BY ANTHONY EDEN THROUGHOUT.

KENNEDY, John Noble (1893-1970).  The Business of War. The War Narrative of Major General Sir John Kennedy ... Edited and with a Preface by Bernard Fergusson. London: Hutchinson, 1957. 8vo (228 x 145mm). Half title, 2 folding maps at the end. Original black and red buckram, spine lettered in gilt (spine a little faded, some very faint white staining, without a dust-jacket). FIRST EDITION, ANNOTATED AND HIGHLIGHTED IN PENCIL BY ANTHONY EDEN THROUGHOUT, often in very direct terms. For example, on p.xiii of Ferguson's preface (commenting on his [Ferguson's] views on the decision 'to go into Greece'), Eden writes: "Nonsense. [John Greer] Dill & [Archibald Percival] Wavell both favoured it ..."; on p. xvi: "W. [Winston] believed it right to go to Greece. Kennedy with less knowledge did not"; on p.2 (commenting on the printed passage 'Yet again, if we in the General Staff had had our way before the war, we should probably have had sixteen or seventeen divisions committed in France before the end of 1939'): "They never asked for anything like it & I had singularly little support from Chiefs of Staff under Chatfield"; on p.4 (commenting on Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War): "Dill thought very ill of him"; on p.6 (commenting on Dill's reaction to Hore-Belisha's memorandum regarding "re-equipment" of the army): "He said he thought it would wreck my chance of talks with Germany. I told him it would [?]widen them"; on p.25: "Note for my book" [probably The Memoirs, published between 1960 and 1965]; on p.28 (commenting on the passage 'the whole matter of air policy vis-à-vis the Army was in a mess'): "A comment on Nevill [Chamberlain] & [Thomas] Inskip"; on p.81: "Wrong again"; on p.88 (the context unclear): "Did Donovan not tell him that he strongly favoured our help to Greece - for he certainly did"; on p.102 (commenting on the author's views on Cyrenaica and Greece): "This is all paper war by an armchair general"; on p.119 (on Wavell's reported comment that 'we could not hold the Middle East'): "Typical defeatist stuff"; on p.124 (commenting on the printed passage 'The German attack on Russia was still a month away, and we were wholly unaware that it was pending'): "Surely not. W. [Winston] had warned Russia by then"; on p.129 (commenting on the printed passage 'it now became apparent that the Germans were about to repeat the mistake, which they had made once before, of failing to concentrate on one objective for long enough to get decisive results'): "Yes but what part had our intervention in Greece had in this decision of Hitler's[?]. Yugoslavia's coup d'etat - not even noted in this book - had infuriated him. So had Russia's recognition of the new Govt. This had been his first setback. You cannot treat those things in isolation"; on p.157: "All this ignores simple fact. Only place [sic] in which we could defeat Germans was Middle East - Dill knew this: that was why he advocated with me sending forces out there in 1940"; on p.196 (commenting on the passage 'British tanks in the desert were still outgunned and outranged by the German tanks'): "Because the army had refused to settle on a tank before the war. They rejected my suggestion that they accept [?]'Class B'"; and on p.215 (commenting on the occupation of Madagascar): "This is not a full account. The Chiefs of Staff opposed the operation very late in the day purely on political grounds. W. sent for me from F.O. We over-ruled their objections. If the operation had gone wrong, we should certainly have heard plenty about it in books like this." A few pencil annotations appear to be in a different hand from Eden's, possibly secretarial: these are not recorded above.