With so many books, particularly memoirs published about the First World War,

can there really be forgotten memoirs?

In the start of a new series looking at some forgotten and lesser-known books of the First World War,

we begin with an ordinary soldier's tale of the Great War from Gallipoli to the Somme.

As I record this, the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, is just a couple of weeks away.

And I was reading in a newspaper that perhaps as few as 200 Second World War veterans

might still be alive in the UK. Now I think this figure is too low. It could easily be much more like

2,000 veterans of the Second World War still alive. And there are a huge number of people that fit the age bracket to have been alive,

been of military age during that period, whether they all served, we don't know.

But what is clear to me and has been clear to me in the last couple of years

is that that generation of the Second World War is at less

than one minute to midnight now. It's almost gone, a generation that for me has been with me

all my life because my father was one of them, a veteran of Anzio in the Italian campaign, but so much a part of my professional life,

from guiding to television, to writing about the Second World War, which kind of flowed through

at the same time, side by side, of course, with my interest in the Great War. Those two

massive conflicts that dominated the 20th century

have sat side by side in my life all of my life one way or another. And all of this discussion

of veterans of the Second World War as we approach VE Day made me think back to the 1980s and 90s when I was privileged

to interview so many Great War veterans and sadly gradually watch them fade away as the 90s

move towards the millennium and in those first few years of the new century the last of the

great war veterans that I knew were gone and within a few years the very last of them Harry Patch

was gone too. I posted about the Second World War veterans on Twitter or X X as it is now, but it will always be,

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