'A remarkable record - vivid, modest, intelligent and unusually frank.' Harold Nicolson
'It rings true in every sentence.' Bernard Fergusson
In Jan 1944, Allied forces landed at Anzio and Nettuno on the eastern coast of Italy in the attempt to skirt the German lines and secure the passage to Rome. Success depended upon the element of surprise, but the landings stalled and the Allied soldiers found themselves hemmed in at the beachhead in what become known as the Battle of Anzio.
The environment was sodden and humid, and the fighting intense. It was into this desperate situation that Raleigh Trevelyan, then a twenty-year-old subaltern, found himself leading his platoon, right to the most dangerous, forward position, known as 'the Fortress'.
The resulting account, based on Trevelyan's diaries of the time, is one of the most eloquent records of close combat and of the relentless horror of modern warfare written. In direct, intimate prose, it describes the lives, and deaths, of ordinary men, and is a poignant testimony of innocence eroded by the awfulness of war.
- ISBN10 0552088927
- ISBN13 9780552088923
- Publish Date 25 February 1972 (first published 1 January 1958)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Penguin Random House Children's UK
- Imprint Corgi Childrens
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 224
- Language English