Peter Hart - At Close Range

THIS BOOK COVERS THE ADVENTURES of just one regiment of the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. What matters here is the men who fought the battles: not the grand strategy, the operational theories, the tactical minutiae all fascinating enough in themselves but the heart of this book is the experiences of the soldiers, from the traumatic excitement of action to the banalities of life as a soldier at war. The men that sweated over their guns, mastered the abstruse technicalities of gunnery, cursed the diving Stukas, sheltered from German counter-battery fire, flinched at the howl of the nebelwerfer and faced tanks over open sights. These men are the real story. Most of my generation thought little or nothing about Second World War veterans as we were growing up. They were everyman the middle-aged chaps we saw on our streets, at football matches and in the local pubs. Our own parents and uncles. I myself was obsessed with the Great War: it seemed so much more interesting; far more remote; such a tragic waste. There seemed nothing special about the numerous Second World War veterans that surrounded us or so I believed as a callow youth.

I was wrong.

In the late 1980s, as one of the oral historians with the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, I began interviewing Second World War veterans.