Contextless narratives of machines and men clashing in exciting scenarios taken straight from history and made my childhood toys. Battle of Britain, Scramble!, MERCY FOR NONE, VLR – Very Long Range, Tank Buster, JAP TRAP, DEATH FROM THE SKY, Phantom Nazi– Britain’s pulpy Commando comics too were part of my childhood, bought for £1 every weekend as a treat when I went to go buy my dad the Saturday newspapers. the Japanese Zero fighter achieved a kill ratio of twelve to one in its early deployments-Īn endless array of facts. On the 10 th of June 1944 men of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich killed 643 civilians in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. the Red Army tried to train dogs strapped with explosives to run under German tanks. the FG42 was a weapon designed for the German Fallschirmjager or paratroopers, and was one of the world’s first assault rifles. Chiang Kai-shek blew the dykes of the Yellow River in Henan in 1938 to stop the Japanese advance, killing hundreds of thousands of people. the Panzer IV Ausf F was the first model to use a long-barrelled 75mm gun capable of firing armour-piercing shells, which changed its role from fire support vehicle to main battle tank, usurping the Panzer III, which had too small a turret ring to be upgraded with a 75mm gun –

World War Two occupies a special place in history, the meeting of the final gasps of the age of European imperialism with its bloody, full-scale wars of death and destruction, and the beginning of the information age, the relentless modern documentation of all that exists.

And there was so much information about the war! I would read histories of the whole conflict, books on the eastern front, the western front, about German tanks and Soviet planes and Japanese warships, British commandos and (I guess) American guns. So I grew up reading books about World War Two.Īs a kid my dad and my grandad were always big into military history, and I was a hungry reader I started reading about The War – the only war ever, the big boy war – because like any kid I liked machines and like any kid with probable undiagnosed autism I really liked stuff numbers, systems, information.

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