Freedom's Battle III - The War on Land 1939-1945
edited by Ronald Lewin (introduction by Len Deighton)
Vintage, HK$144
The War on Land, 1939-1945 is the third and final volume of the superb, reissued Freedom's Battle trilogy, published in 1993, of first-hand accounts from the second world war that engulfed Europe, Africa and Asia. With the first two volumes, The War at Sea (edited by John Winton) and The War in the Air (edited by Gavin Lyall), the series gathers the experiences of the men and women who fought in the military actions that shaped six years of war. A shortcoming is that it is all from the Allied - and mostly Anglo - perspective. This is unfortunate because there is a lot of good writing from the other side. (Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt, for example, is first-rate reportage from the Axis angle.) Lewin divides the war by years and proceeds in a rough chronological order, with a brief and unobtrusive italicised introduction to each event about to be described - from Singapore and Tobruk early in the war to D-Day and the Japanese surrender of Singapore just a few years after the island's capture. The selected pieces are often short takes from longer stories, mostly prose but poetry too, and the volume is richly illustrated with photographs, making it both effective and affecting.
