EIGHT years of hard work has finally paid-off for a Worcester university lecturer who is celebrating the publication of his book The Bloody Road to Tunis.

David Rolf, a part-time history lecturer at University College Worcester, travelled as far as Germany and America to gather information about the struggle for North Africa in the Second World War between the German and Italian troops and Anglo-American units.

The 62-year-old author, from Charter Place, Loves Grove, believes 'war is a terrible business' and describes the road to Tunisia as being bloody because it was 'paved with men's lives'.

"What I'm keen to show in my book is there's nothing glamorous about war and the suffering of the people involved," he said.

"So I've used a lot of first-hand accounts to spell out what life was like."

The book uses eyewitness accounts from the Allied, Axis and French perspectives during a six-month period from November 1942 to May 1943.

"I try to make my books readable," said Mr Rolf. "It's meant to be based for the general reader. It doesn't presuppose any specialist knowledge."

The author said he was commissioned originally, by Leo Cooper, husband of novelist and broadcaster Jilly Cooper, to write the book.

"It was supposed to be 100,000 words but I couldn't get it down to that level," he said.

After rewriting the book and cutting down the original 250,000 words to 115,000, he went to another publisher.

Halving the length meant Mr Rolf could not use a lot of material he had gathered from Abilene, west of Kansas City.

"I travelled the thousand miles but couldn't use the material," he said.

His book is also researched from the military archives in Freiburg, Germany, and in Washington DC.

Mr Rolf, originally from Kingsland, Herefordshire, has also written essays, articles and book reviews. His previous book Prisoners of the Reich was published in hardback in 1988.

* The Bloody Road to Tunis was published yesterday in hardback by Greenhill Books and is priced £19.99.