Our War
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‘Our War – How the British Commonwealth Fought the Second World War’ tells the extraordinary story of the men and women of the British Commonwealth, from many nations all over the world, who volunteered to fight alongside Britain during World War Two.
How did people of all kinds, races, religions and ways of thinking come together like this? Why did young men and women from Trinidad and Australia, India and Canada, Seychelles, Kenya and New Zealand put themselves at risk thousands of miles from home? Why did they feel so strongly attached to Britain, the ‘mother country’? And how were their lives and attitudes changed by their experiences?
From the jungles of Burma and the night skies over Berlin to the icy waves of the Arctic convoys, the blitzed streets of London and the hellish PoW camps of Borneo and Poland we follow them. Survivor’s guilt, immense pride, PTSD, stoicism and bitter anger: all these are here, in the words of people who never dreamed they would find themselves at the cutting edge of war.
I travelled round the world in the nick of time to catch the experiences of these elderly survivors of many nations. This is the one and only only record of their service and its aftermath.
‘Our War – How the British Commonwealth Fought the Second World War’, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 16 April 2020 in paperback and audio.