Overview

In 1945 Tom Pocock travelled widely and saw the final collapse of the German armies; the horror of concentration camps and destroyed cities; retribution reaching war criminals; and the unpredictable strangers from the east, the Red Army. In Berlin, he climbed through the ruins of Hitler's Chancellery. In Vienna, he roistered with the Russians only to be arrested by them on a trip to Budapest. By the end of the year, he had paid his first visit to the El Dorado of that now distant world, New York, the glittering, happy, prosperous, democratic center of hopes and affections of the Western World. Here indeed is the very form and pressure of the time: the awful stench of death and wholesale destruction; the casual murders and cruelties where over large tracts of territory law and order had collapsed; worst of all, the concentration camps still peopled by the ghosts of human beings, starved, tortured, terrified, and degraded. Tom Pocock's friends had served and died in the war from which he himself had been invalided, but when Hitler was defeated, he shared their feelings of exultation and relief. He was in London for VE Day and his account of it is not easily forgotten.

Full Product Details

9798212117319

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tom Pocock was the author of eighteen books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent. Born in London in 1925, he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of nineteen, the youngest of the Second World War. He has contributed to many magazines and appeared on television documentaries about Nelson and the subject of another of his biographies, the novelist and imperialist Sir Rider Haggard. Jonathan Cowley is a British actor who now calls Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished narrator, having recorded over fifty audiobooks and received AudioFile Earphones Awards for his narration of The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen and The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart. Jonathan can be heard narrating multiple documentaries and commercials. He is also an active TV/film actor who has appeared in TV shows including Grey's Anatomy, Veep, and WestWorld.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available