Coming of Age: 1939-1946 by John Cox

” Now that the Second World War is some 60 years past this would seem to be a good time to collate all the various chapters that I’ve written over the last few years and present them as an entity. No war can really be described as a ‘good’ war especially by the families of those who didn’t return or by those who returned maimed but in the sense that I went through it from the start until the finish and emerged unscratched I suppose that mine could be called a ‘good’ war. Though I spent just under three years in the Middle East in Iraq and Egypt I was never engaged in any action and what follows in these pages describes the more mundane side of military life. I didn’t start writing these chapters until about 50 years after the war and have relied heavily on memory, with some photographs but no diaries; the content is substantially accurate. Dates are included in the Contents page; the starting and ending dates are true and the intervening dates are not more than a month out.” -Foreword by John Cox