1945: The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder

A memoir of the final days of the Second World War from the London of the flying bombs to the liberation of the concentration camps.

Arthur Marshall, Sunday Telegraph
"1945 - we are lucky indeed to have it here chronicled in such absorbing,if often horrifying,detail. Future historians will bless Tom Pocock's name, for other pivotal periods of our world's troubled life were less well served ... one would have given much for Mr. Pocock's presence accompanied by a Leica, at the Battle of Hastings."

Marghanita Laski, Country Life
"It is hard to think of where Pocock was not in that eventful year... Pocock's story is that of the year as a whole, not only of his own experiences, rich, terrible, funny as these were... It is clear that young Pocock had not only an eye for events but a feel for them. On nothing is he better than of the sudden switch of feeling as the war ended."

John Grigg, Evening Standard
"A picture of that extraordinary year which will be an eye-opener to those (now a large majority) who did not live through it and intensely evocative to those who did. Tom Pocock writes unusually well... His idealism never inhibits his curiosity or his lively sense of the absurd... The book conveys to perfection the atmosphere of 1945, in which exhilaration was tinged with doubt and disgust."