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I had just finished writing the very long Together We Stand about the North Africa campaign when it occurred to me to put something together that was a little more ‘bite-sized’.
Wandering round war cemeteries or speaking to veterans, once cannot help but be struck by the very young age of the majority of the participants in the war. So I thought it would be interesting to take twenty-one different people, from across the services and who served in different theatres, who all came of age at some point during the war, and to write about their experiences.
The book can be read as a whole, or each chapter in isolation. There are airmen, seamen, spies and soldiers; Brits, Yanks, Germans and Italians. All had amazing stories to tell, as do most people who served through those long years of war.
Praise for Twenty-One:
‘Holland has already achieved a reputation as a fine and perceptive recorder of human experience. Here, he exploits his skills to describe what it is like for very young people to find themselves performing tasks and sometimes assuming responsibilities greater than anything they could have known at 21 in peacetime life.’ - Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph
‘It is a humbling book. It is also a masterpiece of sensitive interviewing. Holland has done well to get the story of at least some of this generation down on paper: the story not of generals and the heroes, but of the ordinary soldiers, the men who in many cases had never been abroad before they stepped on to troop ships…In a sense it is a lament for the kind of young men who no longer exist; or a reminder that young men have always done great things in war.’ - Andrew Taylor, Times Literary Supplement