1945: The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder - Hardcover

Pocock, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002165406 ISBN 13: 9780002165402

Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services, 1983

Synopsis

A memoir of the final days of the Second World War from the London of the flying bombs to the liberation of the concentration camps.

Arthur Marshall, Sunday Telegraph
"1945 - we are lucky indeed to have it here chronicled in such absorbing,if often horrifying,detail. Future historians will bless Tom Pocock's name, for other pivotal periods of our world's troubled life were less well served ... one would have given much for Mr. Pocock's presence accompanied by a Leica, at the Battle of Hastings."

Marghanita Laski, Country Life
"It is hard to think of where Pocock was not in that eventful year... Pocock's story is that of the year as a whole, not only of his own experiences, rich, terrible, funny as these were... It is clear that young Pocock had not only an eye for events but a feel for them. On nothing is he better than of the sudden switch of feeling as the war ended."

John Grigg, Evening Standard
"A picture of that extraordinary year which will be an eye-opener to those (now a large majority) who did not live through it and intensely evocative to those who did. Tom Pocock writes unusually well... His idealism never inhibits his curiosity or his lively sense of the absurd... The book conveys to perfection the atmosphere of 1945, in which exhilaration was tinged with doubt and disgust."

About this title

About the Author:

Tom Pocock is the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent. Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - 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 19,the youngest of the Second World War. After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, he moved to the Daily Mail as feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent, becoming Naval Correspondent of The Times in 1952. In 1956, he was a foreign corresponent and special writer for the Daily Express and from 1959 was on the staff of the Evening Standard,as feature writer,Defence Correspondent and war correspondent. For the last decade of his time on the Standard he was Travel Editor. He wrote his first book, NELSON AND HIS WORLD in 1967 on his return from reporting the violence in Aden and his interest in Nelson has continued. Indeed, eight of his books are about the admiral and his contemporaries; his HORATIO NELSON was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987. Tom Pocock 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0002165406
• ISBN 13: 9780002165402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256