Tommy Goes To War

The image of the innocent British soldier (or Tommy) setting off with a spring in his step in 1914 to fight the Great War would not last long.Indeed that initial euphoria would soon give way to a deep-seated bitterness as these young men endured the horror of the First World War.In a new edition of this extraordinary book, the uncensored letters, diaries, documents and many photographs tell the story of the British soldier (nicknamed Tommy) in their own words.While there are flashes of their wit and humour, the overwhelming feeling is that of a generation who felt let down by their superiors and left to perish.There are visceral, terrifying insights into life in the trenches and agonising descriptions of the squalor and privations of war.This haunting account also looks at the aggressive drive to recruit more soldiers through the Pals Battalion or Chums Battalion. Friends from the same town or village; professional bodies, or work colleagues among others were encouraged to enlist en masse. They would fight together alongside their friends or colleagues. Many of them would sadly die together and leave communities wild with grief for a lost generation, robbed of a future having barely had a past.With a concise analysis of the British Army in the First World War, we are reminded of the terror of war, the fury, the fear and the frustration of what has been described by some as a war typified by the devastating assessment: lions led by donkeys.

On the centenary of the Great War comes this poignant look at fifty objects never far from Tommy's side – official uniform, good-luck charms, phrasebooks, a sweetheart's letter, some unexpected and others more familiar. With sumptuous original photography and thoughtful text, this is life as the ordinary First World War soldier knew it. Inside front: What Tommy Took To War tells sobering, fascinating stories that bring the ordinary Tommy's experiences back to life with poignant immediacy. With striking original photography by Chris Foster and expert text from noted historian Peter Doyle, it looks in detail at fifty objects that Tommy would have had in his kit and which would have accompanied, equipped and comforted him during his wartime ordeals: official uniform, training manual, cigarettes, good-luck charms, sweethearts' letters, foreign phrasebook and myriad others. Together, these artefacts give us a serious and informative, yet touching and even occasionally amusing, picture of the ordinary soldier's experience of the First World War.

Follow Thomas Miller through the war years as Commando, original member of the Special Air Service, instructor for the SOE, and through to his capture after the disastrous allied attack on Arnhem, Operation Market Garden. Thrown into a concentration camp, he sees no future until he meets a very peculiar officer of the SS, a British hating South African Boer with a vendetta of his own.Inspired largely by real events and exhaustive research, I am hoping to tell a different story. Unusual men can do extraordinary things, but history tells us that the most common man, when called upon, can also do extraordinary things.

Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

Examines the day-to-day life and experiences of the typical American soldier during World War II. Includes a glossary of terms and a brief chronology of the major campaigns of the war.

The extraordinary diaries of Thomas Cairns Livingstone represent twenty years of gorgeously idiosyncratic daily records of a middle-class Glasgow household, over a period spanning shortly before the Great War to the early 1930s.

A mathematician finds himself in the midst of the Pacific War in this “historical novel that can be appreciated by anyone, not just the history buffs” (Scene magazine). April 1945: In the aftermath of the battle for Okinawa, Tommy stands on the deck of the USS Bataan, the Independence-class aircraft carrier that he’s called home for a year. Once, he was a student in the classrooms of MIT. Now, thousands of miles away, he is surrounded by horrors—but uses his mathematical and navigational expertise to do his best to minimize the casualties. In this novel, William Illsey Atkinson tells the story of Japan’s Operation Ten-Go, and the fierce battle that sent dozens of vessels to their watery grave while hundreds of others were damaged from the air. Tommy spans the vast experience of one man’s life, from his hardscrabble childhood in early twentieth-century Dorris, California, to his heroic efforts in the South Pacific and beyond.