Richard Van Emden
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
- Title: Britain's Last Tommies: Final Memories From Soldiers Of The 1914-1918 War, In Their Own Words
- Description:
Britain's Last Tommies is a tribute to the final veterans of the Great War, featuring fascinating interviews with the last servicemen who fought for Britain in the trenches of France and Flanders.
For more than twenty years, Richard van Emden has met and talked to over 270 veterans of the Great War, and his personal memories of them are sometimes funny, often moving, and always full of warm affection. The soldiers' own words, reproduced as the author recorded them, and photographs published here for the first time, come together in this final oral history.
In it the author viividly brings to life not only the devastation of young lives in the trenches but also the comradeship which in some cases outlasted the War and has continued for ninety years.
The book includes many of the very best stories the author has heard, stories which are carefully placed in their historical context. They highlight the problems of soldiers returning from the front and trying to cope with their appalling memories while looking for work, getting married and raising families, and trying to learn again how to lead a 'normal' life.
Uniquely, Richard has included in his book a list of 20 'last veterans', from the last medal winner to the last man at the Battle of Passchendaele, from the last artilleryman to the last Old Contemptible, from the last veteran to have fought at Jutland to the last Gallipoli veteran. Movingly, he includes the name of the last former soldier to visit the Great War Battlefields and the last veteran to lose a son in the Second World War.
Synopsis
A collection of stories told by World War I veterans themselves but also through the author's memories of them: the remarkable, the sad, the funny, and the moving. It offers a list of veterans, who hold the poignant title of being the last Gallipoli veteran, the last Royal Flying Corps veteran, the last Prisoner of War etc.
- Title: The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life Of Harry Patch, The Only Surviving Veteran Of The Trenches
- Description:
Harry Patch, 110 years old, is the last British soldier alive to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. From his vivid memories of an Edwardian childhood, the horror of the Great War and fighting in the mud during the Battle of Passchendaele, working on the home front in the Second World War and fame in later life as a veteran, The Last Fighting Tommy is the story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life.
