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Tommy's War: The Western Front in Soldiers' Words and Photographs

Tommy's War: The Western Front in Soldiers' Words and Photographs

by RichardvanEmden (Author)

  • Used

    Illustrated 2014

    $3.25
Synopsis

Conventional histories of the Great War have tended to focus on the terrible attritional battles of Ypres, of Arras and of the Somme. What they do not tell us is what life was like for the ordinary soldier, what mattered to him, and how he survived, both physically and mentally. Now for the first time, one of Britain's leading military historians, Richard van Emden tells the story of the Great War exclusively through the words and images of soldiers on the ground. In Tommy's War, he gathers some of the very best first-hand material written about the War, some of it published at the time and forgotten, some of it previously unpublished, but all of it wonderfully descriptive and immediate, and often wickedly funny. Tommy humour, frequently very dark, played a vital part in men's mental survival, particularly in times of great stress. Until now its critical role in victory has been overlooked. Richard van Emden restores the balance, giving weight to the soldiers' natural inclination to laugh during their darkest moments. Illustrating these eyewitness accounts with soldiers' own photographs taken on privately owned cameras, often tiny Vest Pocket Kodaks - the smart phones of their day - van Emden has created an entirely new and fresh history of the Great War, giving us a glimpse of `Tommy Atkins' as he has never been seen before.

$3.25

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 384
 Edition: First Edition
 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 05 Jun 2014
ISBN 10: 1408844362
ISBN 13: 9781408844366
Book Overview: Leading First World War historian Richard van Emden shows the War in shocking and moving close-up from August 1914 to November 1918, drawing on never-before-seen private photographs and soldiers' first-hand accounts

Media Reviews
There are extracts from journals and letters: `Remember little Belgium! It's impossible to forget it when you've got half of it clinging to your boots and the other half splashed all over your uniform,' one lieutenant notes, dryly. There are also some astonishing photos taken on Vest Pocket Kodaks, the smartphones of their day. One blurred snapshot shows the famous Christmas truce of 1914 * Daily Mail Books of the Year *
Riveting ... Though sometimes ill-composed and out of focus, these amateur photos offer an extraordinarily fresh account of the conflict. Instead of stiff, set-up scenes, we see what daily life was really like for soldiers ... Pictures like these offer an intimate understanding of the means by which, even in the face of abject horror, these bright, sometimes bashful young faces found the will to survive * Daily Telegraph *
Richard van Emden, who has become almost a posthumous advocate for the poor bloody infantry ... draws on the vast quantity of written and photographic material available on the Great War ... It was, after all, the first conflict to be photographed to any great extent by the participants, and Kodak avidly marketed battlefield-ready cameras the iPhones of the day. As ever, Emden makes the most of these original statements and images * Independent *
Thanks to the VPK, the Great War was captured on film for families at home and illustrated in newspapers and magazines. From this photographic archive, and from the letters and diaries of men at the front, van Emden has compiled their own testimony, quite different from the official propaganda and historical material. The earthy humor and human horror of the casual images of men at war are still, 100 years later, intimate and immediate * Saga *
Author Bio
Richard van Emden has interviewed more than 270 veterans of the Great War and has written fifteen books on the subject including The Trench and The Last Fighting Tommy, both of which were top ten bestsellers. He has also worked on more than a dozen television programmes on the First World War, including Prisoners of the Kaiser, Veterans, Britain's Last Tommies, the award-winning Roses of No Man's Land, Britain's Boy Soldiers, A Poem for Harry, War Horse: The Real Story and most recently, Teenage Tommies with Fergal Keane. He lives in London.