Book Review - Sixty Years On

A book put together by Lewes resident David Arnold and launched just over a year ago has notched up nearly 10,000 sales, mainly by mail order. Sixty Years On tells the story in detail of the years 1944-45, the most tumultuous period in world history. But this book is much more than a record of campaigns and battles of a ferocity, scale and drama that is hard to comprehend today. Though all the big events from the Allied landing at Anzio in Italy in January 1944 through to the awesome impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 are chronicled and illustrated, it is the real life stories of scores of people who lived through those years as servicemen and women, civilians and children that make this book a bit different.

‘I wanted Sixty Years On to be a book accessible to everyone, whatever their age,’ says David Arnold, ‘and I was incredibly lucky to tap into a rich vein of stories and anecdotes from all sorts of people, many of whom had never publicly told their tales before. ‘Though there are stories from people living all over Britain I was also very pleased that there are a number of contributions from Sussex people, not least in that the book’s foreword is by Dame Vera Lynn, who lives in Ditchling.’ In fact Lewes itself provided an early inspiration for the book. ‘In the early Sixties I went to the old Odeon cinema at the bottom of Cliffe High Street to see the film The Longest Day,’ says David. ‘It told the story of D-Day and I was mesmerised to the point of sitting through it twice - that was nearly six hours! ‘The next day I went to Lewes library and borrowed the Cornelius Ryan book on which the film was based. It made for absolutely riveting reading and after this I found myself fascinated with this period of the war.’