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.
John Cox
Ottawa, Canada March 2004