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Hackett, John

I Was a Stranger, [41] 5

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20220916170037 John Hackett, I Was a Stranger | Plain Foxed Edition | A Story of Friendship

I Was a Stranger | A Story of Friendship

As commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, John Hackett was in the vanguard of the attack on Arnhem on 17 September 1944. A week later, when his depleted and poorly supplied force was at its last gasp, he was badly wounded in the stomach and leg. It is this moment, with the battle almost spent and the narrator reduced to helpless dependence on others, which marks the starting point of the book – for I Was a Stranger is not so much a tale of derring-do (though its descriptions of the fighting are vivid) as a story of friendship. The heroism it celebrates is not that of soldiers, but of a household run by three women in a town under German occupation.
20140301104715 John Hackett, I Was a Stranger, Plain Foxed Edition

The Strength of the Gentle

Anthony Gardner on John Hackett, I Was a Stranger

Among Britain’s defeats in the Second World War, the Battle of Arnhem comes second only to Dunkirk in the popular imagination. The parachute troops’ hopeless bid for control of the Rhine crossing in September 1944, waiting for reinforcements that never came, has been described as the greatest ‘might have been’ of the war; the phrase ‘a bridge too far’ has passed into everyday speech.

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