Browned Off and Bloody-Minded by Alan Allport

Browned Off and Bloody-Minded by Alan Allport

More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts, and dangers, was going to be like. Alan Allport's rich and luminous social history examines the experience of the greatest and most terrible war in history from the perspective of these ordinary, extraordinary men, who were plucked from their peacetime families and workplaces and sent to fight for King and Country. Allport chronicles the huge diversity of their wartime trajectories, tracing how soldiers responded to and were shaped by their years with the British Army, and how that army, however reluctantly, had to accommodate itself to them. Touching on issues of class, sex, crime, trauma, and national identity, through a colorful multitude of fresh individual perspectives, the book provides an enlightening, deeply moving perspective on how a generation of very modern-minded young men responded to the challenges of a brutal and disorienting conflict.

‘Browned Off & Bloody-Minded is a deeply researched, well-written and perceptive book that tells the story of the citizen-soldiers who either joined up or were called up to fight, and of how their mores both affected the British Army and were affected by it, even long into peacetime’—Andrew Roberts, Literary Review.
-- Andrew Roberts * Literary Review *

Alan Allport is assistant professor of history at Syracuse University. He lives in Syracuse, NY.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300170757
ISBN 10	0300170750
Title	Browned Off and Bloody-Minded
Author	Alan Allport
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	2015-03-12
Number of pages	424
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.