we live in a listicle dominated world that becomes more binary by the day. Nuance now feels like a dirty word and when we look at things, we seem to rank them by default. When this comes to the equipment of the Second World War, the fetishisation of the machinery has begun to override the basic truth that these incredible machines were designed to kill and that they were operated by men little more than boys.
Robert Radcliffe returns with the second part of his Airborne Trilogy, Freefall. Theo Trickey’s war takes his to North Africa and some of C Company, The Parachute Regiment’s fiercest battles. In Germany, Daniel Garland is experiencing the reality of total war on the civilian population and piecing more of Trickey’s life back together and his connections to the late Erwin Rommel. As Arnhem looms, the battle to get there will be just as brutal as what is to come.
One of the defining moments of my young life happened on a raining autumn day in 1988 on a family holiday to London. We visited Barnardo’s, where my father had spent a brief period with his sister after they had been taken from their mother. We sat in a dull office and a rather officious woman explained to my father that his father was a German POW named Herman. A brief moment of shock and pain for my Dad, who was finally learning a truth about his life he had never known.
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