Remembrance Sunday – and the Poppy Appeal – serves as an annual moment to collectively remember, honour and thank those who have served in the armed forces. In identifying listens that I would recommend to mark this day, I took some inspiration thinking about my father (who was both a veteran and massive reader). His love of books was both decisive and unrestrained. He would pick up and tear through absolutely anything, but he had exacting taste when making a recommendation, so I hope he’d appreciate this list. Among the selections below, you’ll find a mixture of memoir, first-hand accounts and fiction, along with some classics. All of them reflect upon the long-term cost of war, and explore how – and why – we remember. And, of course, each is absolutely fantastic in audio.
This new oral history from Garret Graff – who also produced the award-winning 9/11 oral history The Only Plane in the Sky – is astonishing for both its breadth and depth. A truly epic audio documentary reflecting upwards of 600 diverse perspectives from all sides of the conflict, D-Day employs a talented multicast to bring to life the voices of those who lived through “the Day of Days” so that even 100 years later we won’t forget.
This is another amazing multicast oral history that covers a very different military action, 3 Para’s Falkland battle. Author James O’Connell was driven to write this after reading many inaccurate accounts of what happened there. Wanting to ensure that the full story was captured and memorialised accurately, he revisited the Falklands again and again to retrace the steps of those who fought, interviewing soldiers and reviewing official war records to create a definitive account.
Robert Sackville-West’s critically acclaimed history turns a spotlight on the experiences of those left behind after the horror of war, and the cost of grief and remembering. In the aftermath of WWI, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were unaccounted for, their final whereabouts unknown, leaving gaping holes in the lives of their loved ones. The Searchers uncovers the stories of those who spent years – and sometimes the rest of their lives – desperately seeking answers, and illustrates what that desperation does to entire communities and cultures.
In Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning novel, Gilbert Joseph is one of thousands of Jamaican men who volunteered for the RAF during WWII, subsequently emigrating to London. But the welcome he expected as a soldier was not reflected in the eyes of his new countrymen after the war. The experience of returning veterans is often complex and fraught with resentment and a loss of identity, and perhaps never more so than for members of the Windrush Generation who arrived in Britain in the aftermath of WWII.
On Christmas Eve of 1914 during WWI, there was a seemingly random and spontaneous pause in fighting. German and English soldiers put down their weapons and gathered to share holiday wishes, meagre rations and a moment of human recognition. Though a fictionalised account, this dramatised Audible Original remembers this very real event, as well as the sorrow that it did not last longer.
Like the paper poppy, this is a small bit of ephemera, a nostalgic nod to the memory of war. In 1942 thousands of US soldiers – most of whom would have never before left their hometowns, arrived in Great Britain to prepare for the invasion of France. But first they had to survive their introduction to England. This pamphlet – provided by the War Department – was an invaluable resource. A remarkable snapshot of the collision of two cultures hoping to cooperate, Instructions is in turns funny, wise and surprisingly heartfelt.
Classics
Classic works of fiction, memoir and biography that have shaped our collective notion of what it means to go to war.
