The World at War Bundle

The World at War

Pamela Bright, Life in Our Hands

This haunting memoir by a young nurse takes us into the wards of a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Very few of the patients in the hospital’s 121 camp beds will return to the front line, a few miles away. Pamela’s job is to stabilize the wounded for evacuation, or comfort them till they die. The medical staff work heroically in impossible conditions, but the first thing that strikes you about this young nurse is her extraordinary humility, her determination to learn. Somewhere in the background the war is taking its course, but this is not an account of the military campaign. It describes with complete honesty what working with the injured and the dying in a wartime situation feels like, in words that come straight from the heart.

Katrin Fitzherbert, True to Both My Selves

By the time she was 14 Katrin FitzHerbert had lived in nearly thirty different places and attended fourteen schools – an unusual childhood, and the more so because it gave her two separate identities, one formed in the Germany of the Third Reich, the other in England after the Second World War. In True to Both My Selves she gives a fascinating inside account of what it was like to grow up in a Fascist state, retracing the emotions of her 5- and 6-year-old self. She conveys vividly the dangerous seductions of Fascism and of a charismatic leader – the sense of duty, of obedience, of self-sacrifice to a greater cause, all of which Katrin saw embodied in her adored father. With great courage and honesty she describes how, when she returned to England with her mother after the war and assumed a new name and a new identity, she struggled to face her Nazi past and to make the final choice ‘between England and Papa’. True to Both My Selves is an unforgettable read.

Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who took part in the disaster of Dunkirk could write an amusing book about it. But that is what Anthony Rhodes has done in Sword of Bone, his wry account of the events leading up to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in May 1940 – a ‘strategic withdrawal according to plan’ as the chaos was officially described. But this isn’t a heartless book. Rhodes doesn’t deny the awfulness of war, though the fighting mainly takes place offstage. But being observant and cool-headed, with an ironic sense of humour, he manages to capture the absurdity as well as the tragedy of what took place. Sword of Bone is very far from what is usually meant by a ‘war book’.

Roald Dahl, Going Solo

This sequel to his earlier memoir Boy finds Dahl a representative of Shell, travelling the dirt roads of Tanganyika in an old station wagon visiting distant and often eccentric customers, the people who quite literally kept the machinery of Empire running. It was a free and adventurous life, but nothing like as hair-raising as what happened when war was declared and Dahl joined the RAF. Flying solo in 1941 to join his new squadron, he crashed in the Western Desert and suffered horrendous injuries, but five months later he was up and off again to join the tiny British force attempting to defend Greece. He was clearly a brilliant pilot, and Going Solo is a story of extraordinary courage as well as a haunting evocation of the unspoiled beauty of East Africa in the 1930s and its now extinct breed of expatriates, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’.

John Hackett, I Was a Stranger

In September 1944 John Hackett, commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, was severely wounded and captured during the Battle of Arnhem. After being taken to a hospital in enemy hands and given emergency surgery, he was spirited away by the Dutch Resistance and hidden in a house owned by three middle-aged sisters, who risked their lives to nurse him back to health and help him escape down the canals of occupied Holland to the British lines. I Was a Stranger is less a war memoir than a story of friendship, a tribute by a very unusual soldier to a group of outstandingly brave, unassuming and resourceful people.