About this item
More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts, and dangers, was going to be like. Alan Allport's rich and luminous social history examines the experience of the greatest and most terrible war in history from the perspective of these ordinary, extraordinary men, who were plucked from their peacetime families and workplaces and sent to fight for King and Country. Allport chronicles the huge diversity of their wartime trajectories, tracing how soldiers responded to and were shaped by their years with the British Army, and how that army, however reluctantly, had to accommodate itself to them.
About the Author
Alan Allport was born in Whiston, near Liverpool, in 1970, and is currently an Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University, NY. He specializes in the history of Britain in the period of the two world wars. His latest book, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-1945 was published by Yale University Press in 2015. Sir Max Hastings has called it "a memorable word-portrait" of Churchill's Army, and goes on: "[The author] has distilled a mass of wisdom and gathered all manner of truths under one roof, with skill and judgment". Andrew Roberts has described Browned Off as "deeply researched, well-written, and perceptive ... Second World War history written at its best."Professor Allport's first book was Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, also published by Yale, which won the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award and was described by the Sunday Times (London) as "a wonderfully insightful study ... remarkably moving".He can be contacted at http://alanallport.net.