This book primarily looks at the war experiences of Sergeant Douglas Temperly, REME. Sergeant Temperly was assigned to a Light Anti-Aircraft (LAA) battery where his skills as a member of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers were sorely needed in keeping the Bofors 40mm guns in good functioning order (not to mention the battery's associated vehicles). John Kruse has done a good job with the documentation he has on Temperly himself as well as unit records and other primary sources to give us an idea of the conditions and circumstances under which the Sergeant worked in wartime. While not perhaps as glamorous as being assigned to gun duties with the Bofors and blazing away at the Luftwaffe, Temperly's role (and the many thousands of men like him) as a technician was critical to keeping those guns firing. His trials and tribulations are certainly worth noting and give us a human perspective to the struggle against Germany.
That was the "upside." The downside is that the self-publishing house did no favors to the author by allowing it to go out with the layout that it did. The book has a Table of Contents that is superfluous as the page numbers it uses do not appear on the individual pages. "Extra" material at the end of each chapter is centered between the top and bottom margins of the last page of the chapter. Topic headers are often found at the bottom of the page, with the first paragraph of the material appearing on the next page. It could be that the layout is more Kindle-friendly, but I have a copy of the printed book. There are some good contemporary photos, but several are clumped together in Appendix 2 instead of with the text.
I liked the story. I wasn't so crazy about the way the book was laid out to tell it.
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