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David Twiston Davies's latest, highly entertaining collection of
100 Daily Telegraph military obituaries from the last sixteen years
includes those celebrated for their great heroism and involvement
in major operations. Others have extraordinary stories barely
remembered even by their families. Those featured include Private
Harry Patch, the last survivor of those who went over the top on
the Western Front in 1917 and Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wilson of the
Somaliland Camel Corps who learned he had been awarded a posthumous
VC in a prison camp. Colonel Clive Fairweather, who organised the
SAS attack on the terrorists who seized the Iranian embassy in
London in 1980, also features. The Canadian Sergeant Smoky Smith
won the VC in Italy but was locked up to ensure he would be sober
to receive it at Buckingham Palace? Obergefreiter Henry Metelman
was a Panzer driver who, brutally frank about his Eastern Front
experiences, later became a groundsman at Charterhouse School.
Penny Phillips was an ambulance driver caught up in the retreat
from the Germans in 1940. The Italian, Amedeo Guillet, led the last
cavalry charge against the British; Australian General Sir Frank
Hassett commanded a textbook operation at Maryang San in Korea? and
Lieutenant-Colonel David Garforth-Bles was pig-sticking in India
when a comrade suddenly disappeared only to be found at the bottom
of an enormous well accompanied by his horse with a pig trying to
bite both of them. As Andrew Roberts wrote of the first collection:
They evoke swirling, profound, even guilty emotions... To those
Britons who have known only peace, these are thought provoking and
humbling essays in valour.
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