andrew lownie literary agency

1945: The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder
Tom Pocock

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.

Book Details:

  • Author: Tom Pocock
  • Published Year: 1983
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Collins
Tom Pocock

Tom Pocock

Tom Pocock is the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent.Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19,the youngest of the Second World War.After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine gro...
More about Tom Pocock

Book Reviews

  • "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."
    Arthur Marshall, Sunday Telegraph
  • "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."
    Marghanita Laski, Country Life
  • "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."
    John Grigg, Evening Standard