A Soldier's Story

Lance Corporal Neville 'Timber' Wood was among the last British soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk, he served in Cyprus, Iraq, North Africa and Sicily, took part in the D-Day landings and witnessed the horror of Bergen-Belsen. This is his extraordinary story.
The son of a Hull butcher, Neville 'Timber' Wood volunteered in 1939, at the age of eighteen, to join the British Army's Tyne-Tees 50th Northumbrian Division. Timber was in many ways an entirely unremarkable soldier - he won no medals for gallantry, though he exhibited conspicuous bravery day after day, for years, and he rose no higher through the ranks than Lance Corporal. Nonetheless, he had a remarkable war. As a driver for the Royal Army Service Corps, Timber's job was to get ammunition and high explosives to the front line. It was a job with a high casualty rate, sometimes higher than front-line troops.
The 50th Division was the principal fighting division of the British Army in the Second World War. Four men of the 50th were awarded Victoria Crosses, more than any other division. It was last off the beach at Dunkirk and the first back on it on D-Day; the division was at El Alamein and the heart of the major actions which followed; it took part in the invasion of Sicily and fought all the way from Normandy to Germany, where Timber saw first-hand the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Timber's story is pretty much the British war experience from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. He was even captured, saw Rommel and escaped. This book, written by his son Mike, is based on Neville's extensive wartime diaries and original documents he retained from the war as well as on long conversations between the two of them when Mike transcribed the diaries and recollections as a gift for his father in 2006.

MIKE WOOD is the youngest of Timber's three sons, the one to whom he talked extensively about the war. Timber kept diaries throughout the war and many original documents. When Mike transcribed the diaries in 2006 it led to a flood of reminiscences. A Soldier's Story is the memoir that emerged from Timber's diaries and stories. It is Mike's first book.