The Last Fighting Tommy

Harry Patch was the last surviving British soldier
to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, one of very few people who could directly recall the horror of that conflict.

In his autobiography, Harry vividly remembers his childhood in the Somerset countryside of Edwardian England. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice plumber but three years later was conscripted, serving as a machine-gunner in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. Fighting in the mud and trenches during the Battle of Passchendaele, he saw a great many of his comrades die, and in one dreadful moment the shell that wounded him killed his three closest friends. In vivid detail he describes daily life in the trenches, the terror of being under intense artillery fire, and going over the top. Then, after the Armistice, the soldiers' frustration at not being quickly demobbed led to a mutiny in which Harry was soon caught up.

The Second World War saw Harry in action on the home front. Warmly describing his friendships with American GIs preparing to go to France, he tells too of his tears, years later, when he visited their graves.

Late in life Harry achieved fame, meeting the Queen and taking part in the BBC documentary The Last Tommy, finally shaking hands with a German veteran of the artillery, and speaking out frankly to Prime Minister Tony Blair about the soldiers shot for cowardice in the First World War.

The Last Fighting Tommy is the story
of an ordinary man's extraordinary life.