Showing results by author "William Woodruff" in All Categories

Italy 1944 is the setting of one of the most convincing and quietly magnificent stories about man and war that has ever been written. They were young when they left and sang as they sailed down the Clyde. They didn't know where they were going and they didn't really care. They didn't want to fight and they hardly knew what the war was about. Here, distilled from the experiences and observations of the author, who served in Italy in the British infantry, is the story of those who fought and died at Anzio.

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs begins with him arriving in Poplar in the early 1930s. Luckily he gets a job at a steel foundry, and lives with an old couple in Bow. It also covers his winning of a place at Oxford and his part in the war effort.

Arnold College, Oxford. When Sir George Kemp returns to his old university to celebrate the launch of a new barge, he can't help noticing a photograph on the wall: the 1939 rowing team, of whom George had been the cox... Sixty years earlier had been a heady, intoxicating time for George and the crew. But with conflict inevitable, the nine friends find the dreaming spires giving way to the nightmare of modern war.