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Darkest Hour
Jack Tanner Book 2
- Author: James Holland
- Category: Fiction Commercial Historical
- Publisher: Bantam(UK)
- Pub date: 4 June 2009
- Length: 352 pages
About Darkest Hour
THE ODIN MISSION is a meaty, all-action yarn
– Roger Perkins, TELEGRAPH, on THE ODIN MISSION (Book I of the Jack Tanner series)
it is hard to believe that this will not be the definitive account of the battle for Italy
– Dominic Sandbrook, TELEGRAPH, on ITALY’S SORROW
James Holland has written his best book yet, a gripping, yet compassionate account of the terrible war in Italy
– Antony Beevor on ITALY’S SORROW
The Italian version of Armageddon, Max Hastings’s history of France and Germany during D-Day and VE-Day… profoundly decent and occasionally moving… portrayed with a remarkably engaging touch
– Andrew Roberts, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH on ITALY’S SORROW
May 1940. Sergeant Jack Tanner has been posted to a Training Company at Manston airfield on the south-east coast of England, where his experience is needed before the men are sent to France to join the rest of the 1st Battalion King’s Own Yorkshire Rangers. But all is not well at Manston. Exposure of a fuel racket leads to the death of two Polish refugees and Tanner is certain there has been foul play. When he and Corporal Sykes are nearly killed themselves, Tanner finds his suspicions directed at an old enemy from his pre-war days in India, the Company Sergeant Major, Will Blackstone.
As the Germans launch their blitzkrieg in the west, training is cut short and the entire company are sent to join the rest of the 1st Battalion as they try to stop Hitler’s drive to through the Low Countries. Almost immediately, they are thrust into the thick of the action and cut off from the rest of the Battalion. Soon trapped behind enemy lines, it is largely left to the ingenuity of Tanner to get the Company back to the Allies.
Subsequently caught up in the Battle for Arras and the long withdrawal to Dunkirk, Tanner, Sykes and his new Platoon Commander, Lieutenant John Peploe, find themselves pitted against not only the die-hard Nazis of the SS Totenkopf (‘Death’s Head’) Division, but also the great panzer commander himself, General Rommel. Yet, while caught up in the British Expeditionary Force’s desperate struggle for survival amidst the mayhem and chaos of
retreat, Tanner must first deal with the corrosive treachery bubbling within the Company’s ranks – and an enemy more deadly than the Germans – before he and his men have any hope of escaping from Dunkirk…
About the Author
James Holland was born in Salisbury and studied at Durham University. He has written for a number of newspapers and magazines. He is the prolific author of FORTRESS MALTA: An Island Under Siege, 1940-43, TOGETHER WE STAND: North Africa, 1942-43 and ITALY’S SORROW: A Year of War, 1944-45, and two novels, THE BURNING BLUE and A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS. He has also written and presented a film, ‘Victory in Europe’. Married with a son, he lives near Salisbury.