World War II Database

Full Title: Love, Tommy: Letters Home, from the Great War to the Present Day

Most of us study history with a birds-eye view, playing armchair general, imagining how best to thrust armored columns and to ambush enemy patrols. When doing so, we often forget the anonymous individuals who actually crewed those tanks and those who fired their small arms trying to break out of the ambush. Love, Tommy was a collection of letters written by front line British and Commonwealth servicemen that served to remedy such oversight. The letters were written by those who served, dating from WW1 (when the Imperial War Museum, the archive that provided the letters found in this book, was established) to Iraq. They revealed the perceptions at the front, which were sometimes accurate, other times confused, but always insightful. It was horrified me to see how some of the authors easily spoke of shooting and killing enemy soldiers, as if it was no more significant as squashing insects. On the other end of the spectrum, the longing for families and sweethearts filled the pages with genuine emotions. The last letters such as this excerpt kept me staring at, and perhaps through, the pages, trying to imagine what must had gone through the writers' minds when these letters were penned.

While the actual history contained in this book, offered by editor Andrew Roberts and the letter writers, was overly simplified to a fault, the letters themselves were excellent supplementary material to the study of history. I found Love, Tommy to be a valuable collection that served to remind us the true and ugly side of war and to put human faces to the otherwise anonymous statistics.