Wartime Courage

by Gordon Brown

In these ten stories of Second World War battlefield action, Gordon Brown pays tribute to the courage of a whole generation. Some are stories of decisive action taken in searing heat of combat. On D-Day Company Sergeant Major Hollis of the Green Howards VC stormed a pill-box alone, overcoming its defenders and thus paving the way for a crucial advance to higher ground, while Sergeant Hannah VC, single-handedly fought a fire in a bomber returning from a raid on invasion barges at Antwerp in 1940, as machine-gun ammunition exploded all around him, thus saving the aircraft and its remaining crew. Others are stories of great danger faced again and again. Over many months Graham Hayes and Geoffrey Appleyard of the Small Scale Raiding Force, carried out daring and innovative actions on enemy shipping in Africa and then the Normandy coast, while John Bridge, a physics teacher turned mine and bomb disposal officer, repeatedly practised his carefully acquired skills and knowledge in the most terrifying circumstances from 1940 to 1945, defusing bomb after bomb, mine after mine, always aware that there were no second chances if things went wrong. Perhaps the most daunting and mysterious form of courage he encountered in working on this book was the kind that sustained individuals working on their own on clandestine operations far behind enemy lines. Major Hugh Seagrim GC, in occupied Burma and Violette Szabo in occupied France are only two of such stories of sang-froid and sheer guts.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise and easily readable account of various characters from the Second World War whom the author has singled out for praise due to heroism or courage on their part.

Of course, reading this book comes with the baggage of Brown's disastrous tenure as UK Prime Minister, but I was pleased to find the man's political and writing careers are two entirely separate things. Although I don't think much of him as a politician, I like him as a writer: he has that lightness of touch that it sometimes seems that few authors possess.

I'm hardly an expert when it comes to WW2 chronicles but there's a lot of familiar material in this book, particularly the stories of SOE operatives in France which have been covered time and time again. Still, there are plenty of other intriguing snippets, particularly Slim's adventures against the Japanese in Burma and the decency shown by a squad of British soldiers in their dealings with a Jewish girl hiding out in a barn.

It might not be a book to set the world on fire but I found it a cosy read and an uplifting look at the heights to which mankind is occasionally raised.