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Big Fight
The Shelf2Life WWI Memoirs Collection is an engaging set of pre-1923 materials that describe life during the Great War through memoirs, letters and diaries. Poignant personal narratives from soldiers, doctors and nurses on the front lines to munitions workers and land girls on the home front, offer invaluable insight into the sacrifices men and women made for their country. Photographs and illustrations intensify stories of struggle and survival from the trenches, hospitals, prison camps and battlefields. The WWI Memoirs Collection captures the pride and fear of the war as experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike and provides historians, researchers and students extensive perspective on individual emotional responses to the war.
- GenresHistory
280 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2024
First hand account written by an Australian who in 1915 fights at Gallipoli, then to England where he is assigned to a British regiment and fights in France as a Lt of infantry, an observer in the RFC and commander of a tank. He tells in vivid detail his experiences in trench warfare up to his being wounded and evacuated to England. He receives the MC from the King in 1916.
March 7, 2015
Of Irish upbringing but a British soldier of ten years by the time of WWI, Fallon was initially sent to Sydney to help with enlistment, but he agitated to join the front line, becoming an Anzac and thus part of the disastrous landing at Gallipoli in 1915.
Of the Anzacs he readily admits that many of the men who rushed to enlist after the news about German atrocities in Belgium were 'larrikins', assorted gangsters, hoodlums and drunks, but that the army training and sense of shared purpose straightened them out and made soldiers of them.
The landing at Gallipoli as he describes it is like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan, as Fallon's boat is shelled, the men shot in the water or entangled in a trap of barbed-wire, the dead quickly piling up on the beach, the living dazed and exhausted, strafed and pounded by enemy fire.
Out of his platoon of sixty, only twelve survived that landing, which Fallon reconstructs in simple yet graphic and unvarnished terms, as he does all of his extraordinary experiences. Bodies are blown to bits, limbs lying all around, men bayoneted at close range, corpses used as camouflage.
Fallon had respect for the Turks they fought there, but when it came to the Bosch it's a different story altogether. On the very first page of his account he ascribes the war to 'the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.'
In Flanders, Fallon witnessed soldiers beheaded and crucified by the Germans and, in one instance, a Mother Superior nailed to a church door. Is it any wonder that after this and other foul acts described in the extraordinary chapter 'Hun Beastliness', that he declares:
'I am afraid that I ceased thinking of Germans as human beings from that time.'
As if seeing the worst of the action at Gallipoli, Flanders, and later the Somme wasn't enough, Fallon also became embroilled in a dogfight with a Fokker at 15,000 feet while out on an aerial reconnisance mission, and also led a raid in a prototype tank.
The mission that finally brought an end to his war, a daring raid across No Man's Land into an enemy communications trench, ends in the most astonishingly brutal and miraculous way, once again narrated in powerful yet understated simplicity.
I am not ashamed to say that his description of this raid, the injuries he suffers, his amazing escape and recovery, brought tears to my eyes.
Of the Anzacs he readily admits that many of the men who rushed to enlist after the news about German atrocities in Belgium were 'larrikins', assorted gangsters, hoodlums and drunks, but that the army training and sense of shared purpose straightened them out and made soldiers of them.
The landing at Gallipoli as he describes it is like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan, as Fallon's boat is shelled, the men shot in the water or entangled in a trap of barbed-wire, the dead quickly piling up on the beach, the living dazed and exhausted, strafed and pounded by enemy fire.
Out of his platoon of sixty, only twelve survived that landing, which Fallon reconstructs in simple yet graphic and unvarnished terms, as he does all of his extraordinary experiences. Bodies are blown to bits, limbs lying all around, men bayoneted at close range, corpses used as camouflage.
Fallon had respect for the Turks they fought there, but when it came to the Bosch it's a different story altogether. On the very first page of his account he ascribes the war to 'the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.'
In Flanders, Fallon witnessed soldiers beheaded and crucified by the Germans and, in one instance, a Mother Superior nailed to a church door. Is it any wonder that after this and other foul acts described in the extraordinary chapter 'Hun Beastliness', that he declares:
'I am afraid that I ceased thinking of Germans as human beings from that time.'
As if seeing the worst of the action at Gallipoli, Flanders, and later the Somme wasn't enough, Fallon also became embroilled in a dogfight with a Fokker at 15,000 feet while out on an aerial reconnisance mission, and also led a raid in a prototype tank.
The mission that finally brought an end to his war, a daring raid across No Man's Land into an enemy communications trench, ends in the most astonishingly brutal and miraculous way, once again narrated in powerful yet understated simplicity.
I am not ashamed to say that his description of this raid, the injuries he suffers, his amazing escape and recovery, brought tears to my eyes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews