The Soldiers' tale

Focusing on the soldiers of the two world wars and Vietnam, and on the accounts written by victims of war - survivors of POW camps, the Nazi death camps, and the atom bombs - Samuel Hynes shows us how war looks to a soldier on the field at the Somme, or Khe Sanh, or the Salerno beachhead, to a pilot in a Spitfire over the Channel or a B-17 over Schweinfurt, or to a sailor in the Coral Sea.

He draws from accounts recorded under fire and from memories that look back over decades, by both unknown authors whose battle memoirs are their only published work and literary memoirists like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, Elie Wiesel and Tim O'Brien.