In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war. The IWM aural archive has become the most important archive of its kind in the world. Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task.
Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes. These are the forgotten voices of an entire generation of survivors of the Great War. The resulting book is an important and compelling history of WWI in the words of those who experienced it.
Imprint: Ebury Digital
Published: 31/08/2012
ISBN: 9781446446256
Length: 336 Pages
RRP: £9.99
An extraordinary and immensely moving book
This extraordinary book is crammed with details, conjuring up the atmosphere of war as vividly as the frequent descriptions of appalling violence
The words of the soldiers are as fresh as if they were written yesterday ... extraordinary
These stories are so harrowing, and their witness so precise and devastating
The stories of these now long-dead vets simply jump off the page