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The Guns of War
Off-mint
- GenresWorld War IIHistoryWar
1056 pages, Paperback
First published June 30, 2000
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About the author
George Blackburn
10 books5 followersThis is the disambiguation page for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as George Blackburn.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 22, 2023
Captain Blackburn won the Military Cross and the French Legion of Honor. He was the longest-serving Forward Observation Officer in the Canadian army in World War Two. This is his account of his own personal experience and of the bigger picture of the war that was going on around him. Trigger warning: Descriptions of the wounded and dead ahead.
He arrived in Normandy with his unit of 25-pounder guns about a month after D-Day, in July, 1944, and stayed with them at the front line until the end of the war, through the Battle of Caen, the closing of the Falaise pocket, the crossing of the Seine, and fighting through Germany and Belgium and Holland. His job was to get to the front line with a radio, hide, and find targets for his unit of big guns further back to hit. He was in constant danger from the enemy, with a few choice sleeps in blownout basements or even better, a few beers in a still-standing bar.
Blackburn was a reporter in Canada and he could write. This is a great description of exactly what it was like to be there. There is a reason they are still called the greatest generation.
“men suffering utter exhaustion, from heat and dysentery and the neverending itching induced by lice and sand fleas, from never being allowed to stretch out and get a night’s sleep, and from continuously living with grinding tension arising from the irrepressible dread of being blown to pieces or being left mangled and crippled.”
He managed to convey the reality of war and is unflinching in his awareness of his own fear. He was briefly put in the job of an absent colonel and so was responsible, at that moment, for the movement of a brigade across a live battlefield. The experience left him shaken. By the end, he could only cope through steady drinking.
Most World War Two books talk about grand strategy or a certain battle, but this one really shows us the long-haul costs of constant struggle. What is it like to watch a landscape disintegrate in shellfire before your eyes? How do you assess the people around you? And, for Canadians, it is the best book I have found that follows the course of the Canadian army after D-Day until the final victory in Europe. My thanks to Captain Blackburn for his service.
He arrived in Normandy with his unit of 25-pounder guns about a month after D-Day, in July, 1944, and stayed with them at the front line until the end of the war, through the Battle of Caen, the closing of the Falaise pocket, the crossing of the Seine, and fighting through Germany and Belgium and Holland. His job was to get to the front line with a radio, hide, and find targets for his unit of big guns further back to hit. He was in constant danger from the enemy, with a few choice sleeps in blownout basements or even better, a few beers in a still-standing bar.
Blackburn was a reporter in Canada and he could write. This is a great description of exactly what it was like to be there. There is a reason they are still called the greatest generation.
“men suffering utter exhaustion, from heat and dysentery and the neverending itching induced by lice and sand fleas, from never being allowed to stretch out and get a night’s sleep, and from continuously living with grinding tension arising from the irrepressible dread of being blown to pieces or being left mangled and crippled.”
He managed to convey the reality of war and is unflinching in his awareness of his own fear. He was briefly put in the job of an absent colonel and so was responsible, at that moment, for the movement of a brigade across a live battlefield. The experience left him shaken. By the end, he could only cope through steady drinking.
Most World War Two books talk about grand strategy or a certain battle, but this one really shows us the long-haul costs of constant struggle. What is it like to watch a landscape disintegrate in shellfire before your eyes? How do you assess the people around you? And, for Canadians, it is the best book I have found that follows the course of the Canadian army after D-Day until the final victory in Europe. My thanks to Captain Blackburn for his service.
November 14, 2009
Spike Milligan's war memoirs are the only WW2 books devoted just to the artillery that I've read, and they were less a study of the artillery as an weapon of war, and more a study of artillerymen seeking escape from their war.
Blackburn's two books- here collected in omnibus, are simply magnificent. He gives a vivid account of the sheer sweat and toil of the Canadian gunners' lives as they unloaded unheard of volumes of ordnance on the hills and fields of Normandy in that long hot summer of 1944. Also gripping is the battle for the Scheldt estuary later that year, a bloody slog through cold, wet flooded fields.
A raging and humane read with some astonishing moments of insight, and a valuable addition to any amateur WW2 historian's bookshelf. Read this, and know artillery. ;)
Blackburn's two books- here collected in omnibus, are simply magnificent. He gives a vivid account of the sheer sweat and toil of the Canadian gunners' lives as they unloaded unheard of volumes of ordnance on the hills and fields of Normandy in that long hot summer of 1944. Also gripping is the battle for the Scheldt estuary later that year, a bloody slog through cold, wet flooded fields.
A raging and humane read with some astonishing moments of insight, and a valuable addition to any amateur WW2 historian's bookshelf. Read this, and know artillery. ;)
June 24, 2012
One of the best collection of WWII memoirs. By single artillery officer. Read this if this is the only WWII book that you read.
November 12, 2019
See my review of 'The Guns of Victory' by this author.
April 18, 2014
This is an absolutely heart-rending autobiography that tells of the slow breakdown of a forward artillery observation officer in northern France and the Low Countries after the Normandy landings. It gives a real insight into the way men at war, if they have any ability to think at all, seem to carry a finite reservoir of what can be called 'courage' that drips away, or is sucked dry, by steady stress.
There is one image that I shamelessly stole for one of my novels, giving proper acknowledgement, which to me summed up the author's experiences as a a whole. His job was to get close enough to German formations to observe the fall of shot and radio corrections to the gunners. Clearly, that would not make him popular with the enemy, and so he was a prime target. At one point, he is hiding behind a wall while a German anti-tank gun picks it apart stone by stone in the attempt to find and kill one man.
That wall, falling piece by piece, is such a powerful metaphor for the realities of combat stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. A truly powerful book.
A word to the publishers: thank you for the cover. Like the statue of a GI put up by the ignorant and insulting owners of the 'Trois Planeurs' cafe at Pegasus Bridge in Normandy, it is nice to be reminded yet again that the only people fighting the Germans in WWII were the Americans. Thank you for the gratuitous slap in the face for the author.
There is one image that I shamelessly stole for one of my novels, giving proper acknowledgement, which to me summed up the author's experiences as a a whole. His job was to get close enough to German formations to observe the fall of shot and radio corrections to the gunners. Clearly, that would not make him popular with the enemy, and so he was a prime target. At one point, he is hiding behind a wall while a German anti-tank gun picks it apart stone by stone in the attempt to find and kill one man.
That wall, falling piece by piece, is such a powerful metaphor for the realities of combat stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. A truly powerful book.
A word to the publishers: thank you for the cover. Like the statue of a GI put up by the ignorant and insulting owners of the 'Trois Planeurs' cafe at Pegasus Bridge in Normandy, it is nice to be reminded yet again that the only people fighting the Germans in WWII were the Americans. Thank you for the gratuitous slap in the face for the author.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 18, 2017
This is a great book. Or actually two books combined into a one volume edition. It is an account by the author of his time serving as an artillery officer in the Canadian Army in North West Europe from just after D day until the end of the war. It mixes in detailed accounts of what it was like to man the guns, as well as to serve as a forward observor (which the author had the dubious distinction of being the longest surviving one in the Canadian Army). It mixes this personal account with an overview of the role of the Canadian Army in the European war, which I was somewhat ignorant of before reading this book. Its well written and reads well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews