McBurney, Charles Brian Montagu, 1914-1979
by J Desmond Clark
- Date
- 19 Apr 2016
- ISBN
- 978-0-19-726013-5 hbk
Extract relating to military intelligence work:
The outbreak of war disturbed the normal tenor of of life but, as luck would have it, he was sent with the RAF(VR) (USA - he did not become a British citizen until 1950) to the Middle East. His service in the Western Desert in 1942/1943 introduced him to African prehistory, and the finds he made in those years along some twelve hundred miles of the North African coast (later (1947) described in Proc. Prehist. Soc. 4, 56-84) led directly to the work in Cyrenaica for which perhaps he is best known.
[Although the above extract is not so informative, McBurney’s involvement in photographic intelligence work is revealed in the Memoirs of Grahame Clark and Dorothy Garrod.]
(See: List of humanities scholars who worked in military intelligence in the Second World War)