"The only way to understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to listen to the men who were there on the ground. And often, there was nowhere more dangerous to be. In the 1980s, Peter Hart and his colleagues at the Imperial War Museum embarked on an extraordinary project: to reconstruct one battalion's war in staggering detail, based on interviews with its remaining members. The soldiers of the 16th Durham Light Infantry were ordinary men in an extraordinary war. From their ragtag beginnings to nerve-shredding close shaves, shelling and painful losses during the North African and Italian campaigns, the toll on each and every one of them was intense. The challenges of dealing with not just physical suffering, but mental anguish could be unbearable. Combining gripping history with eyewitness testimony, Footsloggers is a human look at the inhuman nature of war"--Publisher's description.