WESTERN DESERT CAMPAIGN - LEES, Leslie John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

RAF airman's archive from the Western Desert campaign, Egypt, Libya, the Levant, and Iraq. A British airman's substantial archive, comprising photographs, autographs, ephemera, and medals.A skilled photographer, Jack Leslie Lees (1912-1980) was a leading aircraftman at the RAF's Air Ministry Experimental Station (AMES) Number 235, a British radar unit employed in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt, and Tobruk, Libya, where they suffered German attack in 1942. His personal archives hold extensive records of his military service and activities on leave between 1940 and 1943. The photographs portray Lees and other soldiers during their free moments and in battle, as well as everyday scenes at the base and outside. He photographed Aboukir, Alexandria, including the zoo, Cairo, and Mersa Matrouh, the site of several battles.In 1941 he was in Tobruk, where he photographed, as always, everyday scenes and interesting buildings, and documented the siege; he was also in Derna and Benghazi. Lees was especially fond of Jerusalem, where he visited and photographed the holy sites. The first album opens with a Certificate of Pilgrimage, with a chip of rock from the Grotto, from Lees's visit to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, issued, signed, and stamped (in Greek) by Archimandrite Kyriakos; Lees also kept a memento with the leaf of a tree from the Garden of Gethsemane. The albums include fine views of Beirut's cityscape, and other areas of Lebanon where he visited ruins and the Jezzine waterfalls, as we

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