For a baby boomer brought up on the Biggles stories of Captain W E Johns, the opening pages of this classic memoir of World War aviation seem eerily familiar. Cecil Lewis and his schoolfriend decide to enlist in the RFC at the age of 16.
With the Old Breed is a harrowing, visceral account of a US Marine’s combat experience fighting the Japanese in Peleliu and Okinawa in 1945. Together with Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, it provided the material for HBO’s acclaimed 2010 television series The Pacific. Excellent though the latter was, the book offers much more.
Frank Richards holds a unique place in military writing, for several reasons. His book Old Soldiers Never Die is reckoned to be among the finest war memoirs ever produced, and one of very few to be written by a private soldier. Richards was himself a rarity, having survived active service from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 right through to its conclusion in November 1918.
The new All Quiet on the Western Front will, I’m sure, be popular and, like the British feature film 1917 (directed by Sam Mendes), will bring the horror and futility of the war to a new generation.
Soldiers is a personal selection of stories about war by a leading military historian following a lifetime spent studying the subject. It is not a heavyweight tome, but a fun-to-read book – if one can use such a term in…