About this item
Selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013The most horrific battles of World War II ring in the popular memory: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, to name a few. Monte Cassino should stand among them. Waged deep in the Italian mountains beneath a medieval monastery, it was an astonishingly brutal encounter, grinding up ten armies in conditions as bad as the Eastern Front at its worst. Now the battle has the chronicle it deserves. In Monte Cassino, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams provides a vivid account of how an array of men from across the globe fought the most lengthy and devastating engagement of the Italian campaign in an ancient monastery town. Not simply Americans, British, and Germans, but Russians, Indians, Georgians, Nepalese, Ukrainians, French, Slovaks, Armenians, New Zealanders, and Poles, among others, fought and died there.
About the Author
Peter Caddick-Adams was born in London in 1960 and educated at Shrewsbury School, Sandhurst and Wolverhampton University, where he gained First Class Honours in War Studies; he received his PhD from Cranfield University. He worked in the House of Commons, then taught at Oxford and Birmingham Universities before being appointed Lecturer in Military and Security Studies at the UK Defence Academy in 1998, and Lecturer in Air Power Studies at RAF Halton since 2012. Concurrently, he pursued a second career in the UK Regular and Reserve Forces, was commissioned in 1979 and joined the Reserves in 1985. He has extensive experience of various war zones, including the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. During 1996-7 he was the official NATO Historian in Bosnia, based in Sarajevo, and was also the UK Historian during the Iraq War of 2003, based in Qatar and Iraq, and has written extensively on the campaigns he witnessed, including Afghanistan. The author of six books, his latest, a new history of D-Day 1944 - Sand and Steel (Preface and Oxford University Press) - will be released in May 2019, in time for the 75th anniversary. His three previous works, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge 1944-45 (Preface & Oxford University Press, 2014) , Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell (Preface and Oxford University Press, 2012) & Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives (Preface, 2011) were best sellers and Monte Cassino is now the basis for a movie for which he is the historical consultant.
