X The Sharp End

There are untold campaign histories of World War II that reduce epic battles like Arnhem, the Ardennes and Okinawa to dry strategy and movements on a map. But warfare is fought with, and by, men - individual flesh and blood humans who happen to be soldiers. John Ellis, in this classic book now reissued by Aurum, presents the human experience of the Allied front line soldier in the most destructive war in history. Ellis takes us through all the different aspects of warfare: training, discipline, morale, food, shelter, fear, and above all life and death in the combat zone itself - but he does so through the testimony of the men themselves, on what it was really like to fight in the sodden foxholes of France and the fly-blown nothingness of the African desert, and on the freezing mountaintops in Italy and in the claustrophobic jungles of Asia. Acclaimed by military historians from John Keegan to Len Deighton, this definitive, deeply humane book is now reissued with an approving introduction by Max Hastings.