Anything but average

Mike Peyton is the author of the brilliant memoir An Average War — though in truth his war was anything but. In October 1940 he joined his family regiment — 4th battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers — and was overrun and all but wiped out on 6 June 1942 fighting a rearguard action in the Western Desert. He was a POW first in Italy, then Germany, where he witnessed the bombing of Dresden. (‘I thought, “No one but no one should be under that.” Yet another part of me was exulting and saying, “Serves the bastards right.”’) He escaped and spent the last months of his war fighting with the Soviet army. His wife Kathleen is the author of the bestselling Flambards novels.

By the time the Germans overran us we were so tired we really didn’t care. The gunners fired everything they had at the tanks — in the end it was just smoke shells — then a lot of them just went to sleep.