A FIERCE QUALITY - The Fighting Life of Alastair Pearson, DSO & 3 bars, MC by James, Julian

London 1989, Leo Cooper, first UK edition, hard bound in dust jacket, Fine/Fine condition, 6 1/4 x 9 1/2, 134 pages, illus, maps, index.----------------------------------------------------The biography of this amazing Scots soldier, Brigadier Pearson served in the Parachute regiment in WW 2, including service in North Africa, Sicily and North West Europe. Alastair Pearson, the subject of this biography, is one of the very small band of men to have achieve the distinction of winning the DSO and three bars Add to this the fact that he also won the Military Cross and is further entitled to the post-nominal letters CB, OBE, TD and HML and it will be readily understood that this is a book about a very remarkable man.In his early years Pearson gave little indication of those outstanding qualities of leadership he was later to display. Born in Scotland, educated at Sedburgh and apprenticed to the family firm in Glasgow, his life followed a pattern of respectable middle-class normality. The outbreak of the war was to change all that and it is with Pearson's extraordinary achievements as a fighting soldier that Julian James largely concerns himself in this book.---------------------------------------------------------When people talk about great leaders of men, the mind is apt to turn automatically to names such a Slim, Montgomery or Rommel, but it should not be forgotten that such leaders were in most cases several stages removed from the men themselves. Pearson was not; he was there in the thick of it, leading his men into battle again and again, every time inspiring them to that last apparently superhuman effort.Ill-health prevented him from pursuing a military career after the war but one can not help feeling that peacetime soldiering would have been something of an anticlimax. Pearson, as this book leaves one in no doubt, was the fighting soldier par excellence.