The diary covers his time in North Africa, Sicily and finally the Normandy Invasion and is, as Prof Hew Strachen writes in the Foreword, 'one of the great personal narratives of the experience of war to come out of the British Army in the years 1939-1945.' Where the diary excels is not in word pictures of heroism and gallantry but in describing the day to day existence with its rounds of intense action, death and destruction followed by boredom, weariness, disintegrating braces, dirt, bad food, toothache, lack of mail and endless gossip exchanged in what passed for toilets ('
latrinograms').