I came across this via a couple of keywords I typed into Google Books as part of my research for an abortive World War II-related nonfiction book. Up popped a reference to Studio Europe, which turned out to be a wonderful 1945 memoir by an American artist who travelled to Europe to draw the conflict.
His quickfire sketches complement his intensely atmospheric, witty, and compassionate account of his experiences. I can’t understand why this fantastic book never seems to be referenced in books about the war.
I re-read this in the wake of writing an introduction and afterword to a forthcoming edition of Julian Maclaren-Ross’s humorous yet melancholy Memoirs of the Forties, which could be described as a 1940s Withnail & I.
First published in 1944, The Stuff To Give The Troops collects his often very brief short stories about his far-from-heroic experiences as a conscript in the British army during World War II. They’re written in a conversational style that still feels fresh and modern. So too does their jaundiced tone, which prefigures M*A*S*H and Catch-22.
You can see why these stories quickly established him as a rising star whose admirers included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.
Like First Light, the classic Battle of Britain memoir by Geoffrey Wellum, And Some Fell on Stony Ground provides a vivid and sometimes terrifying portrait of life as an RAF pilot during World War II.
Unlike Wellum, however, the author of this short, fictionalised memoir wasn’t a fighter pilot. He was, instead, a member of Bomber Command, whose crews endured the nightmare of recurrent nocturnal flights over Nazi Germany, where they dodged searchlights, anti-aircraft fire, and lurking German night fighters.
Read Leslie Mann’s posthumously published book, and you’ll feel you were there with him.
A unique glimpse of the deadliest profession of the Second World War.
In June 1941, Flight Sergeant Leslie Mann, a tail gunner in a British bomber, was shot down over Du?sseldorf and taken into captivity. After the war, wanting to record the experiences of the RAF's 'Bomber Boys', he gave voice to his private thoughts and feelings in a short novella, uncovered only after his death.
Visceral, shocking and unglamorous, this compelling story transmits as rarely before the horrors of aerial warfare, the corrosive effects of fear, and the psychological torment of the young men involved. The sights, sounds, smells,…
Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms offers the first comprehensive account of what was hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II. This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising young Ivy League graduate-turned-US Embassy code clerk, whose lovers include Helen Mirren’s aunt. Against the atmospheric backdrop of London during the Phoney War period, his work as a Soviet spy brings him into contact with the eccentric MI5 spy hunter Maxwell Knight as well as the high society fashion designer and Nazi spy Anna Wolkoff.
